Toneelgroep Amsterdam. William Shakespeare. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Festival Theatre. 10 Mar 2018
Foolish are we to associate the word “royal” with nobility, glamour and privilege.
As the Dutch Toneelgroep theatre company ropes Shakespeare’s king plays together, it is to remind us for once and for all that the Royal Houses of English history are an ugliness of ruthless ambition and power politics.
Their Kings of War production, a breathtaking centrepiece to the Adelaide Festival 2018, is an epic saga of unadulterated regal awfulness. From five of Shakespeare’s plays, it focuses on kings Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III and the machinations not only of their ruling eras but of the dukes and earls and cousins and the seething pits of conspiracy and ambition of the royal courts of yore.
Toneelgroep places these plays in a contemporary landscape upon a massive open-plan set which features bleak corridors leading behind the scenes to power-plays, deaths and vignettes of loss. Onstage centre is a giant screen on which happenings on and off stage are depicted. There’s a cameraman amid the action a lot of the time and his images loom large on the screen. Sometimes there’s a mystery of where on earth is the camera? The film images keep coming. The camera tracks deaths of kings behind the scenes, always laid out in white on a hospital gurney emphasising the great anonymising equaliser of death.
The kings and their court are in modern garb - the same dark suits and ties which define male power today. This underscores the grim reality that, while the nature of wars and political sabotage may have changed some, the essence of their loathsome power games has gone on and on and the perpetrators notoriously are male. These Kings of War are long dead but new kings of war are out there now.
Hello Trump. Hello Putin. Indeed, in a rare light moment, Richard III takes a break to give them a quick tingle on his royal telephones.
The staging itself is clever. There’s a war room in one corner. Another one is over there. There are musicians boxed aloft to sound horns of war and pomp and mourning. There’s a bed which is a royal chamber or barracks, there are war maps and, as scenes and periods move on, there are war tables and lounge settings. And, of course, most importantly, there are the surtitle screens - one over the video screen and another above the stage itself because the actors are speaking in Dutch.
This makes the four and a half hours gripping not only in terms of the action evolving onstage but because the audience must be reading very swiftly and at the same time watching the players, most of whom are look-alike men in suits. It requires quite intense concentration.
Of course, there are women in the plays too. They are high-born but also chattels of political power. Henry V might be besotted by Katharina but it is her father, France’s King Charles, who decides her marital fate as a tool of national diplomacy.
The wooing of Katharina is one of the sweet moments of the production. It’s a lovely piece of gruff romantic ineptitude by Ramsay Nasr as Henry; a bit of language comedy. And in positive terms, it symbolises two royal houses seeking peace after the ravages of war, of kings healing wounds for the sake of their people.
The modern war reportage style employed by the production works brilliantly; its showing of Henry V’s incursions into France have particular impact. The maps are projected onto the screen and one sees the Battle of Agincourt as if on CNN. The audience gasps as the death toll is posted: 10,000 French, 112 English. The descriptions of the battles are graphic. Put your babies on spikes. Fighting men tired and dirty. And amid it, bursts of Shakespearean thought, philosophising the tragedy and cruelty of war, and delivering chilling sentiments in exquisite poetic expression.
While the liberties in the adaptation of these Shakespeare plays are legion, not to mention that it is spoken in that wildly guttural other language, director Ivo van Hove has retained a sense of integrity for the beauty of the Bard’s use of English.
Henry V dies young of dysentery just after he produces an heir and that baby is raised by the court and a regent. He takes the throne the moment he is old enough but he is never mature enough. Eelco Smits plays young Henry VI as a poor, nerdy, insecure weakling. His grief over the murderous death of "Uncle Gloucester” is heart-rending. He has violent fits and is inconsolable. While the squabbling wheelers and dealers of his Royal court run the show over his head, he takes support from prayer. Poor little Plantagenet.
Richard III is played by Hans Kesting, and oh, how masterfully. In this production his disfigurement is a dramatic port wine stain across his face and an awkward gait. Cursed “by dissembling nature”, he says.
It may be the winter of his discontent, but his royal court has been modernised and has Persian rugs, couches and plants. The household views the world on the television and eats jam tart. And there is another surprise show-stopper scene - the silent eating of the very tough tart.
The murderous world goes on. The princes toddle off to the tower. The music moves from horns to DJ effects to a counter tenor singing solo to thunderous rumbles and mad metronome. “Where will it end,” it choruses. The soundscape is as striking and original as the mounting of the work.
And Richard, reviled, devious Richard, goes mad and bounds around. “My kingdom for a horse”. The royal world is bedlam.
Kesting’s portrayal of Richard is endlessly interesting and, thanks to the close-ups enabled by the camera work, the audience can see right into his eyes as he talks to himself in the mirror. One shares in his self-pity and self-hatred.
Toneelgroep brought us the sensational Roman Tragedies in 2014, an epic about which people continue in their effusive praise. Kings of War is not on its vast scale but it is nonetheless an extraordinary feat of theatre.
It is another of those very special theatrical experiences for which we love and thank our Festival of Arts from the bottom of our hearts.
Samela Harris
When: 10 to 13 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Plaza Parlour at Royal Croquet Club. 9 Mar 2018
Help! I Think I Might Be Fabulous is a highly recommended uplifting, biting, and oh-so-funny show about self-affirmation and the joie de vivre that can come from being true to one’s self. It leaves a smile on your face that is still there long after the show is over. It’s completely feel-good!
Alfie Ordinary is anything but ordinary, he is ‘fab’! ‘Fabulousness’ is of course knowing your own strengths, appetites, limitations and reasons for being alive, including being ‘out’ if you are ‘not out’, and then proudly and passionately living that way all the time, rather than suppressing one’s real-self for some or all of the time.
Alfie takes to the stage dressed in costumes that have consumed nearly every sequin, splash of glitter and eye-lash left in Australia, and it would have been difficult to find any with Mardi Gras having barely been put to bed for another year. He announces cheekily that he is the son of a drag queen which makes him a drag prince, and from then on the laughs come thick and fast!
The show can almost be described as juke-box musical for a solo performer. Not far below the surface of the hilarity and hilarious antics there is a serious narrative, and the songs that Alfie sings, or are sung by guest stars Whitney Houston and Bette Midler in the form of gorgeous and side-splitting puppets, become part of the story.
Deservedly, this is an award winning show, and it is one of the best hours one has spent at the Fringe. Don’t hesitate to see it yourself, and enjoy the ambience of Fringe across the river at Pinky Flat. (Warning: It’s a cashless society at Pinky Flat, so take a card if you want to buy a Pimms or a G&T or a …)
Kym Clayton
4.5 stars
When: 9 to 18 Mar
Where: Plaza Parlour at Royal Croquet Club
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Due Bus Ltd. The Howling Owl. 8 Mar 2018
Not happy, Jan, that Monsieur Lucont started up 20 minutes late. Doesn't he realise there's a festival on, and people have other things to do? Lucont's laconic insouciance was perfectly aligned with his unapology, and he got the audience laughing at itself for mucking up the timetable. Well done! Or very rare for the comic to get away with it so easily.
I've seen this handsome French devil before in the Fringe and the Gaul with the gall is as funny as ever. This show relied heavily on participation and the whine list was provided by the audience before the show. Lucont had no trouble satirising whatever anybody said with such aplomb that you had to laugh. His fine singing voice was expressed in a risky, cringe-worthy song about love lace. Much humour was made of the British and Brexit.
While Lucont's laid-back style is precious, a critical breakthrough energy must still be attained, and he needed more wind, sun or gas on the evening of my attendance. Not more whine.
David Grybowski
3.5 stars
When: 6 to 17 Mar
Where: The Howling Owl
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Joanne Hartstone & Gavin Robertson. Treasury 1860. 7 Mar 2018
There's literary earnestness at Writers’ Week and rowdy theatrical hi-jinx at the Unearthly Garden.
But in the quiet centre of town in a rather streamlined and elegant bar where people can sit in comfort with a fine wine or cocktail and some yummy hot nibbles, there is Greg Byron, performance poet.
He’s a wonderful wandering bard and, of course, there’s no better bard space than a bar space.
Byron rolls up in a wonderful costume, waistcoat and long buttoned dress coat, very period and English and also very warm.
He’s here from the UK under the umbrella of the Joanne Hartstone season so one knows he has class.
He has a little black book which is full of his poems. He picks and chooses among them, sizing up his audience and the mood of the moment. He skips over Brexit poems and things he deems dark and dull. The US election, there’s a spot of fun. He reads a poem about the orange man. He has a poem about British political apathy, but he can’t be bothered to read it.
The audience is liking him already.
He’s a personable poet and has something of the actor about him. It turns out that he has had an acting career but that he has chosen life as a troubadour of rhyme and perhaps reason.
His poems have a bit of a satiric edge to them. A political whammy sometimes. Whimsy. Wit. Nostalgia. Surprise, surprise, even a Fibonacci poem. That feels like a first. It’s a ripper.
There’s an Attenborough poem, an eco-poem on the polluted sea, a Postcard from the Beach in Spring and there are recorded sound effects operated by Anna Thomas, behind the bar of Treasury 1860.
Just for variety, he throws in some prose.
It is easy to settle back and let Byron regale with his North England accent.
Greg Byron is his character name. The actor behind it is Gavin Robertson and one just has to admire the very essence of him, wandering the world with nothing but a talent and poetry. It’s a perilous living.
But he certainly breathes good and mindful air into the Fringe.
And. methinks, he may just be first poet ever to rhyme “Aristotle" with "golden wattle".
Samela Harris
4.5 stars
When: 7 to 18 Mar
Where: Treasury 1860
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Also at Stirling Fringe - Coventry Library 9 to 11 Mar
Anya Anastasia. Queen's Theatre at The Lab. 8 Mar 2018
Social activism, politics, varied media and popular culture of many modes have commingled as long as humans have created social structures. Anya Anastasia’s The Executioners is one sharp and very subtle satirised blend of such elements in our times, built to leave you seeking the genuine article from cravenly false bullshit.
Pairing up with fellow musician Gareth Chin, Anastasia’s cabaret polemic finds delicious voice through her super hero, super hi tech, super white costumed, snarky activist/futurist character. She struts her stuff on a set design screaming ‘I’m a star activist,’ in the mould of your least favourite such celebrity.
She is engagingly smug. A bitchy songstress of popular causes against the eroding influences of social media, climate change politics, people power, freedom movements – you name it, she’ll have a rant to fit. Yet this star is as trapped by the alluring dangers she sings against, as much as she figures herself an executioner of evils. At the forefront of her, is her iPhone with torchlight on, shining the light on her and the audience in modern collective solidarity, supported by an iPad attached to the microphone stand. Social media sharing in collective algorithmic ensnarement.
But behind the extreme modernist front, exposed through costume and fantastic film projection work by Underground Media, lies the music and in that, the trick of this production if you know your history.
Listen closely. You’ll hear the styles of folk and 60s protest songs written for piano, ukulele, and piano accordion along with the lilting strains of the peace movement embodied in the sitar. You can’t pick a song of the era, but the style Anastasia links her cracking lyrics to is unmistakable.
This tack brilliantly marries past and future takes on politics in which the urgent heartfelt, blood-and-sweat, passion infused activism of the past meets socially pretentious and selfish causes rallying of today.
This is one show political junkies with a cause to scratch definitely need to see, and embrace its musically sharp one, two, jab right, upper left, to flaky activism.
David O’Brien
5 stars
When: 8 to 12 Mar
Where: The Lab at Queens Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au