Orpheus

★★★★★

Adelaide Fringe. The Yurt at The Courtyard of Curiosities, The Migration Museum. 17 Feb 2024

Orpheus is a modern take on the classic Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and it is just superb. It is written and presented by Alex Wright and Phil Grainger, who have been presenting the show around the world for several years, and they are totally at home with it.

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is well known and has been retold in a range of forms, including opera. It is about Orpheus, a notable musician and poet, and his wife Eurydice who sadly passes away. Orpheus ventures to the underworld and enters into a pact with Hades, the god of the underworld, to return with his wife to the land of the living. Needless to say, it doesn’t turn out as Orpheus has hoped.

In Wright and Grainger’s retelling of the myth, Dave (i.e., Orpheus) is an ordinary bloke from Yorkshire who leads a colourless and routine life that reaches its high point each weekend when he goes to the pub with his mates where they drink, sing karaoke, and try to pick up girls. Dave’s life is turned upside down when Eurydice, a vision of loveliness dressed in blue and yellow, comes into the pub and catches Dave’s attention. Life is never the same for Dave from then on. It’s as if he is reborn. But, events transpire (no spoilers!), and… life is never the same again.

Wright is the storyteller, and he is gifted. He knows the power of the spoken word and has the audience eating out of his hand. Carefully chosen silences see the audience arch their backs in expectation of the next utterance. When he closes his eyes to underline a moment of joy and longing, the audience dare not blink as we savour the moment. His telling of Dave and Eurydice’s story is quite beautiful, and the passing of an hour seems just like a moment.

Throughout, Grainger interpolates extremely well-chosen extracts from songs to underline key points in the story. Bruce Springsteen gets quite a workout, and the audience willingly joins in. (This could go horribly wrong, but it doesn’t. Indeed, it assists the audience to invest more deeply in the narrative. Even Her Excellency the Honourable Frances Adamson AC, Governor of South Australia, who was a member of the audience, got right into it!). Grainger sings to his own guitar accompaniment, and he uses a capo a lot of the time, which allows him to play in a leaner way that does not detract from the poetry.

Orpheus is quite an eye-opener - a gently emotional but also humorous theatrical experience.

Kym Clayton

When: 17 Feb to 3 Mar

Where: The Yurt at The Courtyard of Curiosities, The Migration Museum.

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

Two of Them

★★★★1/2

Adelaide Fringe. Shifting Lives Theatre. Lecture Gallery at MOD, University of South Australia. 24 Feb 2024

Russell Fewster’s play, Two of Them, is inspired by the artwork of renowned Adelaide artist and art teacher Christopher Orchard, and in particular the bald-headed, dark-suited male figures who have populated his virtuosic drawings for many years. Orchard’s figures represent the everyman in his search for meaning in an absurd world, and Fewster has recreated Orchard’s art as a story depicting this search.

Subtitled ‘An Existential Journey’, the play implicitly refers to the existentialist philosophies of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre et al, and to the absurdism of novelist Albert Camus.

The play opens in the foyer, where the assembled audience has been asked to wait to be ushered in. Two versions of the bald man — Abe (played by Nick Bennett) and Balt (Dominique Sweeney) — appear and measure the space with a long tape-measure, as if assaying the audience as a volume.

On entering the auditorium — the MOD lecture gallery — we see a woman holding a plumb bob, a device used in building construction and also featuring in Orchard’s 2014 drawing The Diviners, which depicts two bald men carefully studying a plumb bob. The use of the bob extends the concept of measurement or calibration of the world, perhaps reflecting the mechanical way in which we apprehend the world.

The play takes the form of an ongoing dialogue between Abe and Balt. Their personalities at times diverge and converge as if they represent the internal dialogue of one individual. Abe seems extroverted while Balt seems more of an introvert — two sides of one person, or of all people. Naturally, these characters recall Vladimir and Estragon, but rather than waiting for someone (Godot), they are reconsidering their lives. Abe is concerned with the world of work and his future employment, while Balt wants closer connection with the environment.

But writer-director Russell Fewster has added a third character, Fate (Sophie Hollingsworth), who acts sometimes as a ringmaster, a props manager, or a participant in the action — an antagonist. For example, she is a police interrogator when Balt is arrested at a protest against environmental destruction. In moving props on and off stage, she is signalling the intervention of fate and represents the external realities of life that we all unavoidably encounter.

Hollingsworth’s character may be seen as representing the three fates in Greek mythology — Clotho the spinner who weaves the threads of each person’s life, Lachesis, the allotter, and Atropos, the inevitable (death), and the play is about the desire to escape one’s destiny. The presence of this third character adds a dimension taking the work beyond Orchard’s concept.

A large video monitor is mounted on each of the four walls of the space, showing images of Orchard’s work that are especially pertinent or inspirational, and some of these images have been recreated as animations. Indeed, the play resembles a drawing in space, as the performance space is a rectangle that represents pictorial space (the audience is seated on all four sides), and the movements of the performers can be seen as pictorial animation.

The play has no central narrative, but rather an emerging theme, that of trying to launch oneself into a world beyond the confines of one’s existence in the manner of the existentialists. The dark humour of the script and action is typical of absurdist theatre, and fate is omnipresent.

Bennett, Sweeney and Hollingsworth give excellent performances. The staging is simple but highly effective, with an excellent musical score and lighting.

Audience members do not need to be familiar with Orchard’s art to appreciate this outstanding and highly original play. Two of Them stands on its own as a fine work.

Chris Reid

When: 20 Feb to 9 Mar

Where: MOD (University of South Australia)

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

NB: Readers interested in Christopher Orchard's art can see his current exhibition at BMG Art, 156 Halifax Street until 16 Mar 2024

Yuck Circus

★★★★★

Adelaide Fringe. Umbrella Revolution, The Garden of Unearthly Delights. 22 Feb 2024

There’s a bit of a double take as the cast of Yuck strut onto stage, and I use the term ‘strut’ deliberately. Moustaches and obvious crotch bulges match the masculine posturing; that macho pelvis thrusting walk, that leer, that posturing to impress. That strut.

All the while, this acrobatic troupe of women are clambering over each other, on shoulders, on heads, on backs and fronts. And strutting.

This is a piss take of the male gender of the first order. A few blokes in the audience were already looking taken aback, recognising that the piss was being taken out of their tropes in a gentle but very funny way. For the most part, everyone else was along for the ride.

And what a ride it was. The shock and horror of the male gaze being interrupted by the sight of blood on the back of a skirt. The confessions of what women have done under the influence of alcohol, tempered by the brutal “I had half a glass of water and killed a man”.

Subverting the dominant paradigm wasn’t confined to gender roles; while we were not going to get away without arial ropes, the grace of the art form was turned back on itself as the clearly talented performer managed to become the gawky, hapless loser in the air. Brilliant. Love in a Nutella jar just has to be seen, and the hula hoops act was the closest we got to a regular performance; even then they had to give it a flip.

A highlight is the chorus line to Tom Jones She’s a Lady. No bush ballet here, rather a floral bouquet, a girl garden.

There’s more, much more. Rope skipping, nose piercing with a nail, emojis, and Abba-esque finale looking for a Man After Midnight. This is fabulous entertainment, biting satire without cruelty, but making the point ever so clearly. Beginning and ending with a bulge in the dacks, this is Fringe at its best.

Arna Eyers-White

When: 22 Feb to 3 Mar

Where: Umbrella Revolution, GOUD

Tickets: adelaidefringe.com.au

Sh!t-faced Shakespeare

★★★★1/2

Adelaide Fringe. The Roundhouse, Garden of Unearthly Delights. 21 Feb 2024

If you think this is just some guy lurching around off his face while the others get on with the serious work of presenting a play, you’re way off base. Sure, this is MacBeth, but not as we know it.

Right from the start it’s made clear what we’re up for. Matt introduces himself as our host and compere, but as it turns out, he’s more a wrangler come nanny, with the assistance of a few audience members.

Matt proffers the evidence before the show begins; a drinks tray bearing the detritus of a pre-show binge; beers, apple cider and the remains of a bottle of Tanqueray (no craft gin here!). And just in case there’s a sobering moment – more beer! There’s a bit of audience required here, and oddly enough it’s all too willingly offered, vom bucket and all.

Banquo is the hapless recipient of this evening’s liquor largesse, and from the opening scene he makes clear that this Banquo is not the character we’ve come to expect. Not his fault. Stabbing all the witches was a good hint, and the Ed Sheeran resemblance doesn’t help.

This is a mixture of adherence to the plot and improv, with probably more of the latter by other players than expected. There is, of course, a fart joke in the first minute, and it all goes wayward from there. Matt has to warn Banquo to stop stabbing people, or there’ll be no cast left, and it does come perilously close.

While not riffing off the jokes, the cast make a reasonable fist of the highly edited script, and shades of the ‘tragedy’ attempt to filter through. They’re rapidly trounced however, and when Sweet Caroline is summoned forth, it’s all over. By the time audience member Adam, who has been co-opted as an assassin, finally gets his man, the audience no longer cares who wrote the bloody thing, or what all that strutting and fretting is meant to signify, but is instead whooping and hollering for Macbeth’s demise.

This is an entertaining night, but in reality, no-one needed to be trashed; the cast was quite happy to trash the play itself without the added impetus of alcohol. Still, who doesn’t like a good gin, eh?

Arna Eyers-White

When: 21 Feb to 17 Mar

Where: The Roundhouse, Garden of Unearthly Delights

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au