Treading Players. Melbourne Street Laundromat. 25 Feb 2016
Happy Ending is a somewhat contorted comic theatrical creation.
As a piece of writing focusing on the complex issues the business of professional massage therapy encounters when sex intrudes, there isn’t much new offered that hasn’t already been dealt with across multiple mediums. At best, playwright Gemma O’Neil offers a reasonably plausible TV sitcom level set of intertwined character story lines involving two massage therapists and their clients who unknown to therapists Gemma (Eva Justine Torkolla) and Melissa (Danae Swinburne) are connected in one way or another. At worst, the writing comes across as still needing several more drafts to find and develop some genuinely challenging depth to issues merely noted, rather than explored so there’s greater structural complexity to the work.
As a production, it's stripped back nature - bare stage, massage table, simple costuming and minimal props - does great service to a number of performances which point clearly to the greater potential in the piece not found.
Danae Swinburne’s Melissa, caught up in the bind of financial, emotional and sexual issues posed by ‘dating’ a client, gives a performance imbuing the writing with everything it lacked - humour with a buck each way’s worth of intelligent, questioning pathos.
Happy Ending’s promise as a work of gutsy comic drama will one day deliver when much more work is dedicated to it.
David O’Brien
When: 25 to 28 Feb
Where: Melbourne St Laundromat and Gluttony – The Carry-On
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Royal Croquet Club & Last Great Hunt. Royal Croquet Club - The Menagerie. 24 Feb 2016
I was attracted to this show by the omnipresent and enigmatic poster imagery of a man in black with a ukulele and a lamp on his head, next to a cartoon of a what's-it and a who's-it, also with a lamp on his head. And the gongs! Best puppetry, original show, theatre production, outstanding solo show awards from all around the globe.
But poor Alvin. Global warming has created a water world and his wife's soul, in a rather macabre deathbed scene, heads for the deeps of the blue sea. Whether Alvin is determined to save the world or to die by the bends to meet the missus is not altogether clear in this fishy tale.
Perth-based Tim Watts's creation is an elegant blend of the visual and performance arts. After watching Alvin in the opening cartoon sequences don a diver's helmet for his long descent, he suddenly appears outside the round screen and I say to myself, "Oh, there he is. He really exists!" and all he was, was a hand-in-glove and a softball-sized sphere with a light in it. Yet I believed. The performer, perhaps Watt himself, has us swimming along with Alvin, searching ever deeper. We are voyeur and voyager. Light and sound are scarce commodities in the ocean and the experience is dreamy and ethereal.
While charming and beguiling and ingenious and all that other stuff said on the flyer, I also found it a bit soporific. For all ages.
David Grybowski
When: 12 Feb - 14 Mar
Where: Royal Croquet Club - The Menagerie
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
By Donal O’Kelly. Presented by Arts Projects Australia. Irish Theatre Showcase - Fishamble New Play Company. The GC. Feb 23 2016
Two chairs. Two actors. A spectacular experience.
Perhaps with a nod to Joyce, this is a piece of absolutely splendid writing by Donal O'Kelly.
It's a thriller in which an Irish thief and a Scottish nun team up to elude the Nigerian baddies and deliver the crucial evidence to the right man in Dublin.
It is fast and furious. It is darkly funny. It is a pertinent comment on corporate power and corruption.
Sorcha Fox and Donal O'Kelly play the two heroes along with the myriad goodies and baddies encountered along the way. They are consummate actors. They devour the immense script with an intense focus which keeps the audience riveted. Their considerable stage skills simply carry one along on the narrative, believing absolutely in the bumpy car and the wild ride in the night, the villains and weirdos they encounter, the danger and, at times, the folly.
One loves them both. It is a great story with wonderful characters. It is a ripper yarn very well told.
It is one of those glorious works which reminds one why it is one so loves the theatre.
*****
Samela Harris
When: 23 Feb to 13 Mar
Where: The GC
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Bakehouse Theatre. 23 Feb 16
Satirising television news media competing on a big story is an idea with plenty of promise.
Quite a bit of work has gone into this production. It has a large, enthusiastic cast. It has quite impressive multimedia.
Clearly the play is supposed to be funny, but no one was laughing at the Tuesday preview. Perchance, they were checking their watches.
The play seemed to go on for ever, so laboriously did it tease out its interpretation of that siege in King William Street. Its conclusion was that it didn't happen and, hell, I don't know what its conclusion was. There were some wacko popping champagne bottles with some sad transgender drunk in a brothel and PAC boys were running around. Desperate news reporters tried to beat up some news.
The play's assumption is that some fusty anchor in Sydney is obsessing about sponsors and ratings and thinks Adelaide is such a dead end that the very name of the town means a plummet in ratings.
The assumption is that female television reporters dress and behave like vapid flirts fixated by their status on social media.
The assumption is that reporters fabricate information.
The assumption is that the police are dolts.
Nothing really hits the mark. The Jay Weatherill take almost gets there. The stories on the news ticker are amusing. The police terminology moment raises a smile.
But really, this is one of those Fringe experiences when nice people are having a lot of fun together on stage and the audience is not.
Todd Gray stands out and is good at prompting fellow performers who lose their lines. Dan Brasher is fun.
Ironically, after this lacklustre piece of satiric theatre, the cast sweeps back onto the stage and performs an absolutely wonderful curtain call. It is the highlight of the show.
** (one being for the curtain call)
Samela Harris
When: 23 Feb to 5 Mar
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Michael Allen. 22 Feb 16
To ‘chase the feeling’ means being on the coat tails of many feelings and sensations. It’s a perfectly normal quite automatic part of human experience. With one exception, that’s not automatic on the emotional scale of understanding, autism.
Michael Allen’s Chase The Feeling was borne out of meeting and experiencing the work of Adelaide’s Company AT, an all-autistic theatre company in existence since 2007. His experiences influenced and inspired his thinking on the subjects of anthropology and theatre, which Allen’s current Masters of Philosophy is focused on.
So, as Allen’s program notes observe; anthropology operates on a kind of material objectivity. Theatre is all ideas and subjectivity. Actors are skilled communicators of social constructs and verbal language, which autistic people struggle with.
How can this mix work? Simply by getting on the stage, with whatever material there is at hand in a social or otherwise context, immediately allows relationships and ideas to be reconsidered, seen anew.
The brilliance of Chase The Feeling is its focus on the difficult ‘question and answer process of exploration’ required by an autistic person to establish what is what, in an emotional and social context. The explorative and improvisational process the actors embark on becomes a brilliantly theatrical, nonetheless investigative, anthropological journey. It is all thanks to Allen’s superb script constructed of characters, events and discussions he experienced with Company AT.
The performance is executed brilliantly by ensemble of three, Tahlia (Leeanne Marshall), Actor 1 (Julian Jaensch) and Actor 2 (Nicole ‘Nikki’ Allen).
With ease the ensemble follows the lead of Tahlia as she tries to work out what she should know, should feel, should understand about this theatre business, and everything else, as she’s prompted by an offstage voice.
Around all the questions, Actor 1 and Actor 2 bring to life any number of vignettes. From directly welcoming the audience and asking if they understand what’s going on, to throwing Tahlia into surreal scenes questioning if theatre is merely an out there form of community television, to role playing the bone crushing experience of dealing with a social worker.
The idea of actually chasing, defining, knowing, then expressing a feeling in a theatrical context is so subtly done. Marshall, Jaensch and Allen so successfully play up the theatricality and humour of their material you almost lose sight of the core social impetus to the work the drama merely services. You begin to see what many might not consider; the process of establishing social and emotional norms is in itself a remarkable theatrical act offering a new range of possibilities.
David O’Brien
When: 22 to 27 Feb
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre - Studio
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au