Adelaide Festival. Sydney Theatre Company presented by Adelaide Festival and State Theatre Company of SA. Anstey’s Quarry. 5 Mar 2017
It was an act of genius by Neil Armfield to locate The Secret River in Anstey’s Quarry.
The Kate Grenville saga is about home but it is also about the lure and significance of the Australian landscape. Armfield has made the landscape star of the show.
Every way in which the mighty open-cut cliff face of the quarry is presented is in some way awe-inspiring.
With Mark Howett’s superb lighting, it adds mood and comment to every moment of the play.
As the audience arrives, the quarry is beautiful in sunlight, showing off the rich veins of warm ochre hues which are so typical of the Australian landscape. Blackened saplings cling perilously to the rock face. Spreading, leafy eucalypts are silhouetted on its crest.
As the sun sets, the piercing blue sky turns to amber and the rocks glow. Then, throughout the night, the rocks play their part in the play, sometimes mottled and cheerful, sometimes playing with the dancing shadows of the actors, sometimes ominous and dark, sometimes sharply illuminated and etched in their own shadows. The stars come out above. Wind rustles the trees.
It also whips through the audience perched on bleachers.
Warm day turns to chilly night. Very chilly. Audience members huddle in rugs and cling together. They suffer for their art.
But they are rewarded.
Grenville’s plot line is well known, here deftly re-imagined for the stage by our beloved playwright Andrew Bovell. It is the tale of naive, barely literate English convicts claiming land with no comprehension that the land is already occupied by Aboriginal people. Thus is it the confrontation of white and black, the misguided concept of Terra Nullius. The audience knows it will not end well.
When William Thornhill gets his pardon and takes his family up into Hawksbury, he lays claim to glorious land which he soon finds is occupied by Dharug people. They don’t understand each other. He wants them to go away. They want him to go away. He wants to grow corn on the land. They have always harvested prized native food there.
The early interactions are tense but slowly, once Thornhill’s young son has befriended the Aboriginal children, an uneasy friendship begins to emerge. Thornhill finally realises that there is much to learn from the original inhabitants.
However, the Thornhills are not the only white settlers in the area.
Bovell and Armfield paint these white settlers as truly ugly people, ignorant and morally squalid. Criminals. Cockney scum, not the sort to respect Colonial decrees about not killing the Aboriginals.
Armfield makes them into caricatures and the actors clearly relish the freedom to ham it up to the hilt, especially Richard Piper as the violent and scary Smasher Sullivan. There’s gravy on his ham.
Bruce Spence with long oily hair and whiteface is rather ghoul-like; shades of Lurch from the Addams Family.
Saggity, played by Matthew Sunderland, is crass and boorish and Dan Oldfield, the convict Thornhill takes on as staff, is fresh blood and a wily wheeler dealer. Then there is the tough old Mrs Herring, a pipe-chewing survivor. It is a fabulous cameo role nicely embodied by Jennifer Hagan.
Most interesting is Thomas Blackwood who has respected and liked the Aboriginals and settled down happily with an Aboriginal woman. Colin Moody is simply wonderful in this role, dignified, powerful and wise. One loves him. His wife is played by Ningali Lawford Wolf who also plays the immense role of narrator. She is a magnificent presence on stage. The sharp clear edge of her voice pierces the night air and not a word is lost, even to the echoes of the cliff face.
The Aboriginal cast altogether is superb. Steven Goldsmith is graceful and stately as Yalamundi, the Elder. Frances Djulibing is both funny and moving as old Buryia and it is pleasing to see that Bovell has allowed the Aboriginal sense of humour to shine brightly through this adaptation. It makes all the more appalling the bloody denouement of the play - and the human tragedy of our colonial history.
The other tribal members are played delightfully by Natasha Wanganeen, Shaka Cook, Dylan Miller, Marcus Corowa and alternating lads as the younger child Garraway. These all are strong, generous and committed performances - and brave, considering their bare skin in the chilly night quarry.
While the white father, William, is the force of the Cockney family central to The Secret River and Nathaniel Dean’s husky voice and Cockney twang emphasise the contrast of the two races, it is his wife Sal and the compassionate performance of Georgia Adamson who delivers the heart and soul of the story. Their two sons are played by a changing cast of young people on alternate nights, and very well too, judging by the Saturday night lads.
Armfield has delivered to this potent work some very special elements, not the least of them the pack of Smasher’s fierce dogs played by the male actors on long pieces of rope. They are almost more believable than the real thing.
The Stephen Curtis set and the Iain Grandage music complement the dramatic entity ideally. However, when it comes to the greatest impact of this Festival experience, it is Anstey and the lighting which will linger forever in mind’s eye.
Samela Harris
When: 5 to 19 Mar
Where: Anstey’s Quarry
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Louise O’Dwyer. The GC. 4 Mar 2017
Never base your identity on your job, is advice often handed out. Interestingly, for performing artists, that’s a bit of a bind, given so much of who they are is actually bound up in that core sense of being one, and so much of the self is expended in being so.
Louse O’Dwyer’s smooth running 50 minute one act piece allows her to offer an audience of non-performers the unique experience of being on the end of the question every actor hates at stages of their lives. “How’s your acting going?”
A series of friends, relatives and side player characters pop up to give their momentary take on that actor friend or relative, and it’s not really very pretty, if at times delightfully funny.
From the harshness of a caring rellie at a family BBQ, to the unseen, unheard director auditioning Louise, it becomes brutally clear how little anyone really cares for or understands this acting thing.
The sweet irony of an actor creating a series of characters – who represent experiences in which said actor’s whole sense of self respect as a human being is overlooked because they’re an actor – is not easy to ignore.
O’Dwyer’s creations are quirky, fallible, cracked people, delivered with disciplined restraint. What animates all of them is an unfailing desire, conscious or not, to actually care about or understand the actor in the same way they might ask in earnest of someone else, “how’s your career going?”
Think about that.
David O’Brien
When: 28 Feb to 11 March
Where: The GC (The German Club)
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Anya Anastasia. Royal Croquet Club. 2 March 17
Roguish femininity never came in such a beguiling and wit rich mere hour package.
Anya Anastasia was at once Marilyn Monroe, Marie Antoinette and and a ‘demure’ Jane Austen like romantic as she seduced, traduced and spun her audience’s minds, that their hearts might be hers – with some sincere, deep eyed lilting, and pressured passion.
In an evening of love between herself and an easily love struck audience her command was everything. We joined her in an apocalyptic love party in which the dangers of the present were forgotten that we might, together, love.
The genius in the work - as always with an Anastasia creation - is wit, in physical performance, and word, which spins against cliches by substituting stock observations with eye opening, unexpected quirkiness (referencing clichés, nonetheless).
As our paramour sought out her perfect lover, railed in angered sadness, he was not to be found. An audience member is teased and loved here and there and pounced on as a hopeful romantic conquest, one got the sense that either we (the audience) are in love, or she’s too needy for us?
Supporting and blessing the performance was a superb, jazz band who added support in their role as living, breathing scenic extras. Their rich, vibrant genre-crossing musical capability is executed with such calm restraint, yet confident hard-core attitude that it made for a complete, passionate, humorous, sexy evening.
David O’Brien
When: 2 to 19 March
Where: Royal Croquet Club, The Blsvk Forest
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Alison Bennett. The Bakehouse Theatre. 3 Mar 2017
Trade is a newish work of collaborative and physical storytelling devised by Hurrah Hurrah of Sydney. In the first half of the show, trade refers to hedge funds - you give your life savings to a bunch of young people who seem pretty smart and they offset long and short positions in financial markets and try to make you a profit. The team was inspired by a French trader who lost billions in rogue trading as a consequence of the global financial crisis of 2016.
There have been several movies on this theme - The Wolf Of Wall Street, The Big Short, and Margin Call come to mind - but I have never seen it abstracted, physicalised and satirised like this mob has done. Using only office partition frames, power dressing and financial buzzwords, Hurrah Hurrah take us into the cocaine-fueled, hubristic world of big swinging dicks, except most of them are women. Having myself been a share broker at one time, I guarantee you they have nailed it, producing a bevy of very funny physical metaphors.
Of course, the whole things crashes and the finance team morphs into an even more cynical version of the original. The creative team successfully tackles the issues of responsibility, yet shows that greed has no bounds and our vigilance against these vultures cannot end, because really, nothing has changed. A definite go see.
David Grybowski
When: 27 Feb to 4 Mar
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Schaubühne Berlin. Her Majesty's Theatre. 3 Mar 2017
Schaubühne Berlin hail themselves as "one of the most important theatre companies in the world," and have shirt fronted former Adelaide Festival audiences with their audacious productions of Ibsen's Doll House, in 2006, and Tennessee Williams's Cat On A Hot Tin Roof in 2008. Thanks to director, and artistic director of the company since 1999, Thomas Ostermeier, there is a definite theme of high energy edginess mixed with a forensic examination of the darker recesses of the human mind. And Shakespeare's Richard III is a great mind to explore.
This production is a barking mad German shepherd compared to the pet rock versions I have seen in the past. The action commenced explosively with a wild party, accompanied by a descending curtain of glitter and live ear-splitting discordance, celebrating the ascension to the throne of Richard's brother, Edward IV. Amused, Richard whispers with conversational tones into an ever-present microphone suspended from above like some malevolent presence the "Now is the winter of our discontent" speech, outlining his malignant Machiavellian aim to capture the crown for himself. It is through this delicious concoction of intimacy and cacophony that Ostermeier draws you into the regal intrigue like a moth to a flame.
Film star Lars Eidinger is not the miscast old bearded man seen in the Festival's dated publicity. Eidinger's physically contorted Richard III prowled the stage with the anxiety of a cornered bear. Richard humiliates his underlings and woos the widows of his victims with an evil charm. His lack of shame turns your stomach and then he reverts to the audience and brags about it, within and outside of the script. Eidinger even charms the audience - he is before us, entirely naked save for a strapped-on hunch pad over his shoulder, and yet we believe he is the misshapen Richard III.
Unfortunately, not even Ostermeier could prevent the wordy middle third of Richard III from being mildly soporific. After all, it is Shakespeare's longest play after Hamlet. For those who love the audio lyricism of Shakespeare's writing and also are not conversant in German, you are left with the tremendous visual effects of this production and the incredible verbal delivery and physical work of the performers. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 3 to 9 Mar
Where: Her Majesty's Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au