Red Phoenix Theatre. Holden Street Theatres. 20 Aug 2016
Shakespeare invented this thing the world’s gone mad for on subscription TV we call Game of Thrones. Every single one of his history plays and that grand tragedy King Lear, is an exemplar of cut and thrust, blood and guts, gaming for power.
What makes Director Michael Eustice’s production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus worthy of such direct allusion to the biggest thing on the box these last years?
It becomes increasingly obvious in performance, to the experienced ear and eye of a Shakespeare devotee/scholar, that Titus Andronicus is a work which dispenses with the deeper exploration of moral psychology for a much sharper, piercing play on a raw wielding of psychological power as a force of inner terror in gaining power and holding it, with the added gravitas of brutal violence. The text is blood and guts.
Rereading a play has its rewards as in the case of this production. It’s enabled a capacity to see ever more the skill with which Director Michael Eustice has discovered and built up on the rounding circles of desire, intimidation and greed between two families, one conquered, one ruling, with a middle playing family as the emblem of righteousness. Family Andronicus, led by its most august warrior, Titus (Brant Eustice.)
Michael Eustice offers a fluid set design of nothing more than portable set blocks in black against the black floor and walls of the space. In marriage with Richard Parkhill’s deftly careful lighting and Isabelle Zengerer’s exquisitely clean cut and styled costuming, the performance flows with a rich and easy rhythm of emotionally, politically charged gut wrenching drama.
Oh how it rips, as Titus, seeming secure under the sinecure of newly crowned Emperor Saturninus (Matt Houston), happily powers on and his sister Lavinia (Anna Bampton) equally steps forward into a happier life, as their enemies, including Tamora ((Rachel Burfield) are humiliated. That’s until Saturninus gets other ideas down the track, and the gaming starts.
Herein lies the beauty of this production. Each thread line of influence, down from the moment Saturninus takes Tamora for himself, is played with exquisite self-serving logic. From Lavinia and her husband all the way down. Except Titus.
It’s Shakespearian existentialism, as it might be considered.
So much power in beautiful performances, especially by Brant Eustice as the towering Titus, alongside Bampton’s profoundly rich and level Lavinia, Burfield’s richly multilayered, cunning Tamora and Houston’s deftly comic, yet louche Saturninus.
See it. Better than a game of thrones.
David O’Brien
When: 18 to 27 August
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Ian, John Frost and The Really Useful Group. Festival Theatre. 12 Aug 2016
The Adelaide Hills are alive with the sound of music. You're going to see it, aren't you? Your favourite musical of all time? You've known every song by heart since grade school? Live professional production? Well, what are you waiting for?
The Sound Of Music has always been everyone's favourite. Falling in love with the hired help is not an uncommon theme. Captain von Trapp falls for Maria; in fact, proposes to her in the very same scene as the fiancé walks out the door over a small matter, like supporting Hitler's Anschluss. The King of Siam has a placebo-affair with Anna the school teacher in The King And I. But those two parings weren't sordid like when my married cousin had it off with his housekeeper.
The story is based on the 1949 memoir of Maria von Trapp (the governess played by Julie Andrews in the flick). The West Germans milked it for a couple of films before it was conceived as a musical vehicle for Mary Martin, who played Maria, when it opened on Broadway in 1959. Rogers and Hammerstein II's masterpiece snared five Tony awards, including best musical. Hollywood got its hooks into it for a 1965 release which won five Academy awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and a swag of other awards. It's the fifth highest grossing movie of all time. The Sound of Music soundtrack album was the biggest-selling album in the UK for three years, and the second biggest-selling of the 1960s.
That was the movie, but there's nothing like the magic of live theatre and orchestra, and this outstanding production is picture, pitch and posture perfect. What's not to like? The actors come with long resumes. Amy Lehpamer recently played in High Society and as Janet in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Her Maria is madcap comic business and sweet naivety; a person imbued with music, and searching for purpose until she latches onto Captain von Trapp's stoic integrity and his lovable children. With a joyful voice, her Maria is bursting with love and laughter and fun. Double Bravo!
Cameron Daddo as Captain Georg von Trapp is an impressive Austrian aristocrat looking impossibly impeccable in tailored suits. Funnily, his singing is as tiny as he is tall. David James as the politically aware impressario clowns through his schemes. The role of the Baroness Elsa Schräder does not stretch Marina Prior who plays her suitably corporate, and is a great foil of Maria.
Opera singer Jacqueline Dark nearly brings the house down with Climb Ev'ry Mountain and is a sympathetic Mother Abbess. One enjoys John Hannan's butler for his satirical take, and everybody else is great, too. It is a bit spooky at the Kaltzberg Festival when the Nazi stormtroopers with their rifles, swastikas and black uniforms surround the stage.
Oh, yes, the kids! Well, aren't they good! The six youngest are all home grown and they all have resumes, too. I saw Oscar (Award) Bridges only in June in Therry's Big Fish; he's a feisty talent, but so are the rest.
Everything seems to go flawlessly - musical director Luke Hunter's orchestra, complex set piece movements, lighting and great sound. The real Maria von Trapp wrote her memoir to promote the family's singing after the death of Georg in 1947. But she sold the rights to the West Germans, who onsold to the Americans. Oh, well, that's show business!
Double bravo director Jeremy Sams and the lot of it!
David Grybowski
When: 9 August to 4 September
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. Little Theatre. 6 Aug 2016
Director Geoff Brittain has exorcised a devilishly intelligent, tense and driven production from Arthur Miller's The Crucible. Miller wrote the play in 1953 in response to the activities of the US Congress spearheaded by Senator Joe McCarthy in their hunt for Communists. Miller thought it must have been life imitating art imitating life when he himself appeared in front of the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956. In short, it's a witch hunt, which actually sort of happened as presented in the play, in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. The Crucible is also one of the great four of Arthur Miller - the others being A View From The Bridge, All My Sons, and of course, Death Of A Salesman.
Brittain sets the action in what could pass as a manger - a plausible metaphor copasetic with the religious background of the play and Miller's penchant for grand language. I got all that from some straw on the floor and a wooden door. The action starts juicily enough with some girls undergoing wild gyrations in a psychedelic romp led by a Barbados slave (played with exotic abandon by Rhoda Sylvester). One thing leads to another, and before you know it, the girls are accused of flying, etc., and are egged on by the elders to name which good townspeople are doing the bewitching. Miller creates thrilling predicaments of moral hazards which are excellently dramatised by this wondrous cast of character actors.
It's not easy to pretend you're in 17th Century Salem using Miller's turn of phrase, but the vernacular was music to my ears. Trudi Williams' costumes and Richard Parkhill's lighting were a huge help, as were some projected period woodcuts of Satan's mischief, but the absence of a crucifix on the wall or around a reverend's neck was noted.
The young girls, led by Zoe Dibb as Abigail, were quite spooky at times. There was terrific eccentricity on offer from the likes of David Haviland, John R. Sabine, Esther Michelsen, Philip Lineton, Jean Walker, and Deborah Walsh playing the elderly local yokels. You could imagine the beads of sweat appear on Steve Marvanek's brow as his Deputy Governor Danforth (chief prosecutor) exquisitely felt the pressure of condemning to death as the witchery unraveled. Ben Todd was the weirdest Reverend Hale I have witnessed and it kinda worked. The protagonist farmer John Proctor as played by Kim Clark was wonderfully understated and contrasted nicely with others who were less cool and shouted a bit too much. Cheryl Douglas as John's wife, Elizabeth, also rendered a beautifully measured performance. Notwithstanding the above, there was some drama left on the table by these two and Danforth in the climactic scenes at dawn in the dungeon.
This is a very real and exciting Crucible indeed. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 6 to 20 August
Where: Little Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
Bakehouse Theatre. 6 Aug 2016
Swiss dramatist Max Frisch’s Biography: A Game, delves deeply into this need we have to believe it might be possible, somehow, if we could, to change our lives to improve it from the moments it tanked. We all want our life biography to be perfect, without regret.
Life has goals and obstacles, and is competitive; much like chess. Director/Designer Joh Hartog’s set references this, with its raised chess set platform in wood tones on which sits a coffee table, with a chess set with pieces as if a game’s already been played. A couch, glass top wooden cabinet, desk, chair, leather lounge chair and floor lamp shade offset the coffee table. It is cosy, middle class, theatrical.
Frisch’s human chess game with five human pieces takes place on a theatre stage. Biography: A Game is a play within a play. The tension generated between the sense on one hand, we seem to be watching a rehearsed theatre work, on the other, a real life relationship unravelling, is key to the gripping power of this production.
Hannes Kürmann (Tim Lucas) arrives home at 2am to find his partner Antoinette Stein (Krystal Brock) has just arrived before him, not in bed as expected. There’s confusion. She wants to stay up, pours a wine. Mild disagreement plays out. He has to go to work in the morning.
Stage right is a desk at which the Director (Adam Carter) and his assistants (Lisa Harper Campbell and Patrick Clements) sit. At the Director’s command, the scene stops. He replays it himself as Hannes, allowing Antoinette a different mode of play, all in demonstration for Hannes. The scene resumes. It ends badly. Hannes is not happy.
So begins a ‘game’ in which Hannes battles, more than works, with the Director to make changes in his relationships and professional life in such a way things will be pleasing, secure, worthy.
The struggle to control events, control people, control the story Hannes embarks on becomes a never ending trail of confusion, fearful introspection, fear, regret and longing. However Hannes works to stop/start or rewind events he cannot control; consequences springing from his choices.
Can we as an audience dismiss all this as a mere play, or should we allow ourselves a deeper, scarier relationship with Hannes’ genuinely frightening, emotionally crushing experiences, lightened as they are by superbly timed comic moments?
Is this life as we live it? Frisch’s essential question asked in this play, alongside, is there anything we can really do?
Hartog’s cast is a gutsy one, offering powerfully rich performances in which that delicate line between the comic and deeply tragic is maintained with exquisite perfection. Tim Lucas’s Hannes and Adam Carter’s The Director play off each other in a perfect devil-tempting-the-innocent relationship. Krystal Brock’s Antoinette burns with subtle energy and intent, while Patrick Clements and Lisa Harper Campbell’s stage hand/bit character roles enliven the dark pall of Frisch’s writing beautifully.
David O’Brien
When: 4 to 20 August
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre, Main Stage
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
One Point 618. 5 August
Quick Fix is a wonderfully rare thing in contemporary dance. It presents as a brilliant meld of pure theatre and pure dance, a superbly engaging exploration of the lure we call the ‘quick fix’, for our many needs and desires in text and movement.
Choreographer Katrina Lazaroff and creative collaborators/dancers Andrew Haycroft and Rebecca Bainger fashion a work where the set challenge is to balance the psychology of craving, needing things to be ‘perfect’, and how those things play out physically.
The greatest desired quick fix of all centres on the body; to be fitter, faster, thinner, smarter, and more attractive. Lazaroff’s choreography doesn’t merely focus on obvious physical tropes alluding to gym workouts, with assistance from two brilliantly used stepladder stools. There’s a dark and furious undertow to the sharp and angled energetic movement interplayed with rapid fire barked promises of media produced offers, promising to sate desire.
It’s as if Haycroft and Bainger are a couple drifting apart, as the male seeks more of what he wants promised by commercial media, and the female shrinks from it, during the middle phrases of the piece. Bainger’s expressed physical ease with fitness workouts can’t be matched by over large hulking Hayrcoft.
Which brings Haycroft and Bainger to the powerful core of Quick Fix. The deadening desire to shape others to meet unrealistic ideals is driven with superb power by Haycroft. He bends, twists, twirls and pivots Bainger’s body into representations of the ultimate male fantasy of the ‘perfect’ woman. In doing so, Bainger gives great expression of the false, plastic nature of this desired perfection. Haycroft’s body jerks and shakes like a junkie who just can’t get the fix right. He keeps telling us what he wants, tries creating and it and fails.
Is there an escape? Maybe.
David O’Brien
When: 5 August
Where: Marion Cultural Centre, Domain Theatre
Bookings: Closed