Adelaide Festival. Presented by the National Theatre of Scotland, National Theatre of Great Britain and Edinburgh International Festival. Festival Centre. 28 Feb 16
To be seen as one vast experience or as three separate pieces of theatre. That is the question.
A 12-hour epic, three stories with two meal breaks, is a good choice for it becomes intensely immersive and the sheer endurance factor complements the timescale of the Scots history being played out on stage. It tells of the brutal days of the 15th century, of royal accession evolving through a landscape of conspiracy, bloodshed, and arranged marriages. These were times of clan thrusts for territory and power, poverty in the land, and attenuated brutal clashes with England. The House of Stewart is born of deceit, greed, and kings groomed and crowned as small children. The plays are a modern construct by Rona Munro who has taken the bones of recorded history and fleshed out the characters and conflicts using contemporary dialogue which brings home vividly the sense that yesterday's people were much like us.
The Scots and English actors, under the direction of Laurie Sansom, play out the histories on a great dark stage shafted through by a giant sword. Props as simple as chests and tables are rolled on and off but it is a might of wondrous lighting designed by Philip Gladwell which carries the atmosphere and tension. Then there are the startling and booming evocations of the soundscape and the ferocious grating as the huge drawbridge grinds open on its links of chain.
A section of audience sits aloft on scaffolding at the back of the stage, shadowy witnesses to the unfolding dramas. Lithe actors dash up and down the castle stairs around them, squeezing past the legs of the front rows as if they are just stones in a battlement.
James I
The Key will keep the Lock
The king is a boy who has been imprisoned for most of his life in England. He is liberated by a fierce King Henry V who ensures that the boy knows that authority is the product of violence. Young James, whose world has been a prison room with a view into a garden below, is of gentler disposition and inclined to poetic reflection on the world around him. Not a great match for the stomping, hard-drinking clansmen who must pass for Scottish courtiers.
His young English bride arrives with abilities to manage an aristocratic English household but is quite unprepared for the rude intimacy of Scots castle life, let alone the grinding poverty which James must overcome if he is to pay back the British crown the ransom demanded for his liberation.
This is a play of nasty characters, jealous-thug relatives ready to kill at the first opportunity, ready to apply sadistic punishments to neighbours who simply irritate them. It is also a tale of sad tenderness from the young king toward his wife and for her, a tragedy of good breeding downtrodden by a coarse culture.
There is much terrible violence. The stage seems to be awash with blood. It oozes down the giant sword.
The performances are gripping and superb: Steven Millar plays James I; Rosemary Boyle makes a sweet Queen Joan; John Stahl gives us the fierce Murdac Stewart, powerful regent of Scotland, a man perhaps with a conscience; and Blythe Duff plays his sarcastic, spiteful and precipitately dangerous wife, Isabella Stewart. Her three sons are the loose cannons of the plot, the family insiders who are simply thugs. Matthew Pidgeon is a power as the dying Henry V. Sally Reid is a power of a different kind as the Scots retainer dispatched to attend the new queen.
James II
Day of the Innocents
In which the critic moves from auditorium seating to sit on the stage seating, looking down upon the actors.
Since they are all around, up on central stage platforms, walking through the stage audience and moving in all directions on the stage beneath, it is not a bad vantage point. It has an added sense of dramatic immediacy since the seating trembles as actor’s pound up stairs, the drums thunder from behind, or the great drawbridge grinds open.
This is the play in which the king starts out as a perplexed six-year-old with a dramatic port-wine stain on his face. Abandoned by his mother, he is puppet to the powerful Earls and keepers of castles Edinburgh and Stirling. His only refuge is a large box wherein he hides. The Douglas family has risen and is challenging the throne. Young William Douglas emerges to become his friend and playmate, a relationship which grows in complexity, rivalry and, indeed, homosexual tension, as the years roll forth. James lives in a net of cruel and violent men. He is plagued by nightmares. The only compassion is from the women, old Meg, his sister, and his young wife.
The great ensemble cast members move into new characters. Some follow through. Blythe Duff sustains the maternal passion and venom of Isabella Stewart, now in chains, her sons all gone. She is indomitable and becomes a strange oracle as the oldest living voice the young king knows. Andrew Rothney plays James II, compelling all the way from frightened child to mature monarch. John Stahl re-embodies the role as the powerful Livingston, Keeper of Stirling Castle, while Peter Forbes continues, now older and ruthlessly entrenched as Balvenie of the Douglas family, a character who gives domestic violence a whole new meaning.
James III
The True Mirror
Rona Munro has injected plenty of comic moments and ironic humour into these plays and, one discovers, they are realised better from the front of the house than from the stage seating.
In the end of the day, the auditorium is the place best to enjoy the James Plays, albeit "enjoy" is not quite the word for the apprehension, suspense and repulsion that much of the action evokes.
James III is the softest of the plays. It focuses on the women of the court. It dips behind the scenes of those cold, stone castles where queens and servants co-exist, where fashion and perfume are important.
The King now is a vapid fellow, puffed with self-importance. He commands a court with theatricality and glamour. He thinks big. Increasingly, the power players in his court are losing tolerance. He is riding towards a fall and it is his elegant Danish wife, Queen Margaret, who rises to offer stately authority to Scotland.
The plays each are entities in themselves but they run forwards like a suspense series when seen in concert. Their pace is swift and hard-hitting with tight direction and the cast is truly ensemble. The choreography in both dance and battle is superlative.
James I is so tight and well-wrought one simply can't work out where the time went.
James II's ending is attenuated with the great emotional denouement between William Douglas and James. Their relationship is so fraught, so complex and so doomed, superbly realised by Andrew Still and Andrew Rothney.
In James III, the arrival of the fabulous new modern mirror is at first most diverting. But motives are never nice in these plays. Even a mirror can be used as a weapon. From the lightness and humour, darkness descends again. Danger is relentless.
And, after having whooped to their feet for a third grand ovation, the audience members disperse into the night, not as much elated by the brilliance of the experience as they are utterly drained by immersion in the ugliness of political power play, a world of back-stabbing duplicity which is still around but just in a less bloody form.
Samela Harris
When:
James I: Closed.
James II: 1 Mar
James III: 1 Mar
Where: Adelaide Festival Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
À Fleur de Peau. Adelaide Oval. Adelaide Festival. 28 Feb 16
Groupe F’s montrer son et lumière (sound and light show) for their return to the 2016 Adelaide Festival is entitled À Fleur de Peau, which translates to ‘On Edge’.
It is quite literally the case as our senses are bombarded by a spectacular display of fireworks, lights, and flame accompanied by an earthly and soulful ballad which underscores the performance.
It is a remarkable production.
A large screen, atop which sits a stage, is vividly lit with strips of light that dance to a thumping beat, cutting through one's skull and penetrating the very mind. Out of the relentless beat and vividly electric, conductive lighting a man appears to be born. One’s brain is blitzed as the pervasive rhythm continues, mimicking a beating heart – it borders on unpleasant.
A kind of rebirth is given to our senses.
And then there is silence.
Appearing atop the stage our performer, shaped only by the dotted LEDs that cover and define the outline of his person, begins a kind of journey; marching in time as projections of natural elements cascade below him. There is a spectacular kind of visual movement; a trick of the eye which makes one believe he is walking towards us.
Projections of earthly textures cycle below on the enormous screen; lava from a freshly erupted volcano; feathers of a peacock; the petals of flower; skin of a snake; springs of steel; green grass; orange sand; burnt terrain.
One is drawn onto the question of the relationship between the two; the individual and the textures of our planet. The work has been described as a “telluric ballad”, telluric literally translating to “of the earth as a planet, of the soil” the distinction between the man, the music, and the imagery grows ever clearer.
Fire is introduced, like an element to be controlled. And yet it also consumes us. Are we more connected to it than we know?
Oversize humanoid puppets – stick people – are set alight. They glow with varying colours of flame; green, blue, yellow, and red. Interacting like newborns in a mesmerising dance.
The intensity begins to increase for the first of many times. Flames burst forth from all over the stage shooting into the air in a timed display of light, power, and sheer heat.
One feels the intensity on the skin.
As the earthly substances melt away we are transported into space. The LED lit performers are hoisted into the sky by a concealed crane. They render up control of their bodies to the weightlessness of space. Galaxies of stars roll beneath on the screen. The sky is filled with slowly cascading embers from freshly fired fireworks; they light the night sky with hundreds of falling stars.
Outwardly the spectacle pushes more and more boundaries. One’s senses continue to be stretched and cajoled. Performers are suspended from flaming boxes; encompassed in spinning wheels of sparks and flares; they play out a battle of fire and light; it all peaks in a display of almighty flame and fireworks.
Groupe F describe the work as a “dazzling tale [which] addresses the complex relationship between man and his environment… the gradual transformation of a sensitive area is generated by a dual relationship between the individual and his living space…” It asks us to think not just on what is accessible to our senses in terms of sight, sound, and touch – but to consider what complex reaction we have to that deep down.
It is ironic then that so many of the audience remained disconnected from the work behind their iPhones or electronic devices.
In a display of sheer ignorance, many of those in attendance appeared to completely neglect any chance at immersion in the moment, choosing instead to record their interaction with the work like a third person onlooker.
This makes one think even deeper on what the performance is trying to say about our individual relationships with the world around us, and how technology and social online media has changed that.
One is then further saddened by the perpetuation of that ignorance online the following day.
It cannot go without comment.
Art is a vehicle for connecting to, and relating with, our souls and the will and expression of everything and everyone around us.
Groupe F’s, À Fleur de Peau is a 55 minute show.
I implore everyone to shut it down for an hour. Leave the technology behind. Don’t speak; there is time for that later. Live in the moment while you have the moments in which to live.
The performance was for one night only and sold-out. So if you didn’t see it you have sadly missed out this time. But if you do get a chance to see a work like this… don’t miss out next time, by being there and not being present.
Paul Rodda
When: 27 Feb
Where: Adelaide Oval
Bookings: Closed
Friday. Adelaide Festival. 26 Feb 2016
Sequencing sound within sequenced sound, vision and sensation best describes the extraordinary technical and musical synthesis of work offered up at Unsound on Friday night, a night of playing with possibilities theatrical, technical, tactile and physical.
Anyone with a love for work by Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, The Coctueau Twins let alone industrial techno pioneer Blixa Bargeld with Einstürzende Neubauten would have instantly grasped this essential basis not only to the evening’s program, but particularly the dark, classically inclined, majestic, thunderously impassioned glory SUMS: Kanding Ray and Barry Burns, drenched the audience in.
Merlin Ettore joined Barry Burns (UK) and Kanding Ray (France) on drums, and contra bassist Robert Lucaciu.
The soundscapes created by these artists included blending electronic instruments, amplified cello, violin, separate foot pedals, sequenced drum and percussion.
Kanding Ray, standing stage centre, headphones affixed firmly with back purposefully arched over a mixing board, added another layer of sequencing to each musician’s contribution.
The hour of sonorous, deep, thundering swirls of Ettore’s sweat drenched drumming, Lucaciu’s heart stripping cello, Burns’ luscious keyboard and guitar notes ebbed and flowed with power roaring through one’s whole body from the floor, the complete output being totally controlled by Kanding Ray, as much as the work was obviously a deeply immersive collaboration by the musicians.
It could have been music for Vikings, songs of long lost gods, but most of all, it was a long, profoundly affecting anthem to that constantly unfolding musical evolution in which ways of the past meet ways of the future in expressing something beyond the conventional.
Babyfather’s Dean Hunt (UK) switched the groove to theatrical and playful, filling the Thebby thick with stage smoke and a bright wide wash of white light. Here was an act ready to have serious fun mixing up cultural styles and playing games with the physical impact projecting sound and volume can have not just on an audience physically, but intellectually as well; a full on effort to reach as close to a three dimensional sense of sound a vision as possible.
Musically, the set cycled in a loop from bouncing Asian influenced beats and calls, ripped up dub variations, all the way around to the start again, making you think time and again about what you heard. Those dub variations give way to a sonic rumble in the mix that is quite a surprise.
For some, it seemed passé, for others more open minded to the experience, there was definitely a sense of the sound moving beyond its base musical note role; offering that ‘something more’ experience we always seek.
On the visual side of things, work from Jlin (US) and Kode9 (UK) really showed off what it means to mix contemporary sound, vision and movement.
Jlin’s blend of Footwork, flowing video graphics and use of live spice scents was deeply appreciated by the audience. Her physical presence, her moves, the flow of projected visual imagery - it was the most danced to work of the night; so dark, calming, rich and velvet in tonal sensation. Each phase break musically was so clean, but for the visuals, it almost didn’t register.
Kode9’s dystopian live audiovisual presentation amazed and shocked. The visuals based on their album Nøthing took the audience on a live tour of an evacuated, fully automated luxury hotel, ‘Nøtel’. This void built on nothing is crisp, chilling. While musically, it’s a deep, full throttle dance friendly experience many embraced.
The intellectual clash of sound and vision could be taken in a dark and serious manner or the dark subject matter referred to in passing, then just dance.
David O’Brien
When: 26 & 27 February
Where: Thebarton Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Australian Dance Theatre. 27 Feb 2016
Habitus presents as a thoroughly entertaining, richly comic work of fantastical, thought provoking dimensions.
It delves into the strange way we seem contentedly hostage to a materially constructed ‘natural’ world of consumerism, material comforts and associated rituals and rules unconsciously prioritised over anything else, without paying much attention to the actual nature of real nature.
Choreographer/Director Garry Stewart’s program note announces Habitus as the first in a series of new works falling under the title The Nature Series which will delve into the big issue of the century; how we relate to nature, how we care for the planet.
This long term discussion begins with the domestic world we inhabit.
With remarkable surrealistic finesse marrying Designer Gaelle Mellis’ set and costumes, Damien Cooper’s starkly bold cinematic lighting, and Stewart’s rich anthropologically informed palette of moves, Habitus does a magnificent job focusing on how our ‘natural’ world operates, as opposed to how real nature actually is.
Mellis’ colour scheme to the design operates as a key element in successfully getting complex issues across. It’s all about blue. What’s blue? The sky, water, air.
Habitus begins with hard core blue. Blue, in this production, are all the things that are not natural; manufactured clothes, underwear, shoes, hardback books, furniture and ironing boards. Dancers in Smurf shade blue socks have nothing to do with actual nature. But they make you think about it!
What about green, the other obvious signifier of the natural world, you might ask. It certainly makes an appearance. Before green makes its ultimate impact on the production, Habitus powers right into a magnificent series of taut, mechanistic yet gleefully playful routines tying together things obvious in a manner set to make us think about them again.
What we wear, how we handle clothing, the obsession with working out, the importance of utilitarian things such as ironing boards, couches and especially, books (nature’s trees are despoiled as to create a means to hold and disseminate knowledge and rules of social order) get a thorough going over.
Stewart’s choreography comprises a fast, crystal clear perfect series of ordinary day to day moves hyper realised against the bare space with maximum effect for comedy where required. You wonder when the natural world will fight back. It just doesn’t seem to exist.
Central to the success of the work is the thinking behind the book’s role in Habitus as the ultimate tool of rule over the plainly non-natural world. How books are physically organised, worshiped and exchanged is deftly explored with especial focus on how the book over time since its invention, as opposed to the seasons of nature, has more and more determined nurture of the ‘unnatural’ than nature. Book dances and couch dances are magnificent choreographic creations.
The ADT ensemble have an absolute ball dancing Habitus, not to mention a bit of acting and lines of text linking through the work and especially, fantastic comic work from Thomas Bradley, Thomas Gundry Greenfield, Samantha Hines, Michael Ramsay and Loni-Garnons Williams.
David O’Brien
When: 26 February to 5 March
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Slingsby in association with Adelaide Festival of Arts 2016. 5th Floor Myer Centre (formerly Dazzleland). 27 Feb 2016
Oh, Slingsby, you've done it again! Currently lead by artistic director Andy Packer and executive producer Jodi Glass, the South Australian Slingsby theatre production company has toured numerous works to forty-three cities, including performances on Broadway.
In this world premiere, you meet the King's staff on the ground floor of the shopping palace and are transported in his personal elevator to the workshop - follow the advice you receive after purchasing your ticket through BASS which is come a half-hour earlier. You can't meet a king and present coronation gifts looking like a frump or a hobo!
The King is an extremely pleasant fellow played affably by Tim Overton. Ably assisted by Jacqy Phillips who plays a myriad of characters, and on the eve of the King's coronation, together they tell the tale of the old king's grandson, brought back from poverty and banishment, to be crowned the next day. The young king has ordered the finest robes, scepter and crown for the occasion but three well-illustrated dreams bring a change of heart. The story is of absolute relevance today.
Oscar Wilde's short story - dramatised for the stage by Adelaide's Nicki Bloom - is given the kiss of life through director Andy Packer's application of theatrical magic. Geoff Cobham's lighting is minimalist, playful and inventive; eg. The use of shadow play and hand-held torches. Composer Quincy Grant entices a delightful score from the piano, and you are in the court of the King, in a kingdom of citizen artisans, miners, and tree-fellers, you incorporeally haunt a palace, a hovel and forests, and I haven't yet described the poignant imagery of the dreams. Yet in the opening scenes, the young king is such a nice guy, his avarice for fine things is dulled. This is no Scrooge-like transformation. And the final imagery of transformation was rushed and not well established.
Don't leave sans une programme with the whole story published within. Bravo, Slingsby!
David Grybowski
When: 27 Feb to 19 Mar
Where: 5th Floor Myer Centre (formerly Dazzleland)
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au