Adelaide Festival. Schaubuhne Berlin & Theatre de las Ville Paris. Dunstan Playhouse. 9 Mar 2024
Despite warnings about homophobia and alcoholism, one is quite unprepared for the immense potency of this French one-hander by Édouard Louis.
The work opens passively, the performer alone at a table working on a laptop.
Tres ordinaire.
There’s a sofa OP on stage and a plastic garden chair; a standing mic, stick-like at centre stage; and a full screen video backdrop with the image of a foggy French road. One of those scary pollutant fogs where other cars appear like ghosts.
Louis speaks softly in French. White surtitles are just legible high against the video image. Grey roads, white lines, forward movement; time and distance. You cannot go back.
The narrative, however, is from a memoir which trips around chronology, piecing together a tale of family dysfunction, domestic violence, acute homophobia, cruelty and guilt, and the haplessness of a loving mother.
From the start, we understand that mon père is gravely ill and, as his past is revealed, the question of blame rises and who is to deserve what fate or injustice in life? This is a many-layered dilemma and one of the philosophic cores of the work.
Indeed, this one man’s narrative arrays everyman quandaries.
Louis’s stage presence is beautiful as is the pace of the work under the direction of the distinguished Thomas Ostermeier.
The black and white videos of Sébastien Dupouey and Marie Sanchez are a thematic marriage of exquisite atmosphere and aesthetic, as is the subtlety of soundscape from Sylvain Jacques.
It has explosive revelations, bursts of loud American pop music, and effusive drag cameos which explore not only the son’s talents but his father’s hostility towards him. Even for a factory worker who likes to dance, a “faggot” son in rural France is a cause for shame. The father has demonstrated only one tender gesture in the boy’s life. While he would never fulfil his son’s craving for recognition and while his utter reprehensibility caused his son’s flight, there is that hefty anchor called love. There are moments the audience weeps for it.
Louis’s tale reaches deep into our souls.
And, then, the denouement!
Why is that awful father dying aged only in his 50s?
It is not the factory accident alone. Thereon arrives the coup de théâtre. An eruption of agit prop which pins back the ears and breaks the heart.
And, come the curtain, audience members en masse leap to their feet in thunderous acclaim.
This is what festivals are all about.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 10 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Wende and the Royal Court Theatre. The Space. 7 Mar 2024
This shouldn’t really work. What is this, really? A musical? A concert? It is a jumble of musical styles from whispered ballad to Broadway tune to European chanson to hip-hop-ish-electronica-frenzy to round-the-piano singalong. But this production is in no way disjointed or muddled - it is wholly successful, bringing the opening night Space audience to its feet.
The Promise is - loosely - a song cycle that spins its way through complicated emotional territory. The production was developed at the Royal Court Theatre, a collaboration between five female playwrights, composers, and musicians, exploring what can only be expressed in song. And what a powerful expression this is. At the centre of The Promise is an extraordinarily committed performance by Dutch singer-songwriter Wende: she is compellingly versatile - her voice moving from a seductive purr to a full-throated roar to an unadorned clear bell. She is confident, nurturing, fearful, brave, confronting, rousing and raw. Sometimes she sits, still and poised, sometimes she runs laps around the band, dancing and convulsing, sometimes she climbs atop the piano and into the crowd. Wende is engaging and immediate - it feels like she is singing directly to you. She is backed by a talented and tight three-piece band of multi-instrumentalists, driven by percussion and piano. Their collaboration and communication is consistently excellent.
The Promise works so beautifully because it touches, both directly and obliquely, on sometimes messy emotional truths with precision, poetry, and an understanding that truths can be elusive and ambiguous. The songs feel like out-loud articulations of the unformed and unspoken inner dialogues that chatter away in our heads. Thematically, The Promise focusses on the feminine and the feminist. The songs explore danger and risk (“there’s a dark black pool on the edge of the island”), loneliness and isolation, birth and a sense of place, the dark constraints of suburbia, and the fear of aging and disappearing from view. Motherhood, and the choices to have or not have children, are particularly poignant, and explored with sensitivity. In one of the emotional highlights of the performance, Wende draws us all in, encouraging us to sing and repeat her gentle rousing chorus “I’m a good enough mother”.
When Wende belts “I’m a good woman”, this is a question, a manifesto and a defiant claim all at once. And, when she murmurs “It’s not light yet, but it’s getting there” more and more softly at the close of this wonderful production, there is a palpable sense of renewal and hope.
John Wells
When: 7 March - 10 March
Where: The Space
Bookings: Closed
★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Arch, Holden Street Theatres. 7 Mar 2024
It is almost axiomatic that if it’s performed at Holden Street Theatres, then one can expect high quality entertainment, but sadly, Station J – An MI6 Comedy is an exception to that rule.
Station J is an international branch office of MI6 fronting as an import-export business and is staffed by three ‘agents’ headed by Charles (played by James Rosier). He is joined by communications officer Terrance (Sam Browne) and Margaret (Annabel Green). They are grappling with a faulty radio and incoming messages are in disarray. Margaret is in the throes of manually deciphering one such message when they are set upon by Steven (Fi Parrey), a female double-O agent (or is she/he?) who channels and dresses like James Bond, but the text does little to capitalise on the gender bending. As the plot to blow up the world unfolds, they are joined by Admiral Planchett (Kieran Bullock, who co-wrote the play) who tries to outsmart Steven, but is he who he seems? The whole silly plot of double and triple agents culminates in Margaret showing her true colours and saving the day.
The script tries very hard at being funny, and at times seems as if it is trying to draw inspiration from classic British comedies such as Yes, Minister, but it falls short, and the laughs from the audience are sporadic at best.
The set is reasonably sophisticated for a Fringe production, and styles a hidden telecommunications room in a spy agency. The booby trap is almost hi tech!!
The actors play straight (as they should) work hard to extract as many laughs as possible from the script, but it’s hard work to land any real punches. Rosier is almost incomprehensible throughout because of his laboured and forced accent and uncomfortably brisk delivery. By contrast Green is convincing and holds the show together.
Station J is presented by Victorian independent theatre company Social Club Productions who are making a return visit to the Adelaide Fringe following other successes, but this show doesn’t satisfy.
Kym Clayton
When: 7 to 10 Mar
Where: The Arch, Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Elder Hall. 7 Mar 2024
Perpetuum is part of the Adelaide Festival’s Daylight Express excellent mini-series, which features outstanding world-class artists in recital, and they are not your ‘usual’ recitals. There is always something out-of-the-box – they are ideal festival events – and Perpetuum is no exception.
Anthony Romaniuk is a European-based Australian keyboardist who is as comfortable with the music of modernists Philip Glass and John Adamas, as he is with Bach and Purcell and everything in between. In Perpetuum, he has assembled no less than twenty pieces that have velocity and unquenchable momentum at their very heart and has cleverly stitched them together to form a continuous and integrated whole. The collection is drawn from his latest album which also carries the name Perpetuum.
What makes the performance special is that he seamlessly moves between three instruments. On stage there is a grand piano, harpsichord and electronic keyboard (that is also capable of playing back pre-recorded sequences). Romaniuk begins the concert with a lesser-known composition by Erik Satie on the piano (En y regardeant à deux fois, from Pièces froides: Danses de travers), follows it with the Prelude form Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, and them fluidly rotates on the piano bench to face the harpsichord and play his own arrangement of the Prelude from Bach’s Suite in E major, BWV 1006a. Soon he gracefully moves to the electronic keyboard and effortlessly plays Philip Glass’ Etude No.2, preserving all of the subtlety of its myriad of rhythmic and melodic changes. Romaniuk has a superb feel for it all.
Effortlessly, Romaniuk performs diverse compositions from Stravinsky, Ligeti, Schubert, Schumann, Purcell, Shostakovich, Beethoven, and his own inspired arrangement of Toccata Arpeggiata by Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger. He even plays two instruments at once – the keyboard with one hand and the piano with the other as he transitions between one of his own Improvisations and another piece by Satie.
Romaniuk is a tall and slender man, and he sits at the instruments with presence and authority. His playing is passionate – he clearly feels every note and relishes every phrase – and he has an uncanny ability to make the unexpected sound ‘normal’.
Perpetuum is truly the stuff of festivals, and Anthony Romaniuk is a musical force of nature.
Kym Clayton
When: 7 Mar
Where: Elder Hall, University of Adelaide
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival. Nicholas Lens and JM Coetzee. Elder Hall. 8 Mar 2024
Elizabeth Costello is a fictional character — a celebrated Australian writer, aged 66, who is famed for the feminist perspective of her early, first novel. She is devoted to writing but is distanced from her family and has difficulty when communicating her beliefs to others. It seems that her reputation doesn’t quite match who she is, or thinks she is.
Nobel and dual Booker prize-winner JM Coetzee’s novel is written in a partly documentary style and includes Costello’s CV, which confused some readers — in his introductory remarks at this concert, celebrated novelist Peter Goldsworthy told of an incident when he was asked if he had met the famous Australian writer, Elizabeth Costello. The form of Coetzee’s novel invites the reader to reconsider the nature of the novel itself.
Costello has disagreements with her family members over important moral questions, so that the novel is also an invitation to readers to consider those moral issues and their own actions.
Belgian composer Nicholas Lens has composed a full-length opera based on Coetzee’s novel, entitled Costello in Limbo (Elizabeth Costello at the Gate), the libretto for which has been devised by Coetzee. Lens has also created an excerpt from the opera, entitled Is this the gate, for performance by a chamber ensemble and a vocal soloist, and this excerpt is based on passages from the latter part of the novel when Costello has passed away. These are perhaps the most important passages of the novel, as they concern the judgement of one’s life and achievements and the question of an afterlife.
Costello is interrogated by a panel of judges (not St Peter) who demand to know her beliefs — it is on her beliefs that she is judged. This is a message not only to other novelists but to all of us. She is permitted a glimpse of the afterlife, and the text of the prologue is as follows:
Straight out of Kafka!
Straight out of Kafka!
Not the light that Dante saw in paradise.
The nature of the afterlife, or her likely afterlife, is thus characterised by reference to other writers. Implicitly, we understand the world and establish our moral and philosophical compass by reference to writers and their writing.
In the final part of Is this the gate, Costello defends herself with:
I believe what I am.
I believe that what stands before you today is I.
I am!
This absorbing performance of Is this the gate was a world premiere, and Adelaide was privileged to host it. Coetzee and Lens also made introductory remarks and spoke of how the opera was developed. The excellent ensemble comprised Judith Dodsworth, voice, Elizabeth Layton and Helen Ayres, violins, Stephen King, viola, Thomas Marlin, cello, Matthew Kneale, bassoon, and Michael Ierace, piano, and the libretto was shown on screens.
The music is generally turbulent and discordant. The composer gave detailed instructions on the performance of each section, for example, Part 8 What have I seen? is marked “Come camminare sul ghiaccio sottile – Come un rapido piccolo tifone – Di nuovo, come camminare sul ghiaccio sottile – Di nuovo, con una certa goia” (Like walking on thin ice – Like a swift little typhoon – Again, like walking on thin ice – Again, with a certain joy).
Ensemble members briefly sing at one point, and first violinist Elizabeth Layton quietly announced Costello’s death at the beginning. Soprano Judith Dodsworth was magnificent as the troubled Costello, and Elizabeth Layton and bassoonist Matthew Kneale were outstanding, with Kneale’s bassoon creating a nicely inflected parallel voice.
This tantalising taste of Lens and Coetzee’s opera was delightful, but the entire opera must be heard, and it is greatly to be hoped that it can be produced here in the near future.
Chris Reid
When: 8 Mar
Where: Elder Hall, University of Adelaide
Bookings: Closed