★★★★
Best of British Productions. 16 Mar 2023
Best of British is taking place upstairs in the Belgian Beer Café where superstrength Belgian beers are available. Host Dan Willis is also the promoter and producer. Now residing in Palm Beach, Dan could only present Aussie-Brits during the Covid years, but this year’s line-up, at least my night, were all ridgy-didge visitors from the failing state, and their perspectives on things Oz are funny. No Brexit jokes so maybe it’s no joke. Dan appears in his own show, The Meaning of Wife, only this Saturday night, 18 March.
Scotswoman Jo Jo Sutherland delivered witticisms with a lovely lilt and was quick on her feet hamming it up with some Scottish types in the front row. Focusing on family and ironic dysfunctionality, she easily sprayed idiotic bureaucracy and irrelevant behaviours. Sutherland was very playful with a mother of four in the front row who was immensely enjoying her empathy with Jo Jo. Besides this best of British sampler, I recommend you spend a whole hour in her presence in her own show, Growing Old Disgracefully, this Friday and Saturday, 17-18 March. Growing old disgracefully was certainly a theme of my night of Best of British.
I was disappointed Andy Askins did not compute in the Fringe website search engine as I want to see more on him. His schtick is beautifully deadpan and ironic, extending ideas to the ridiculous. Plenty of funnily disturbing self-deprecation, including claiming he didn’t play the guitar he was hiding behind, but then he did so and proved accomplished, especially in flamenco. Pretending to be a meek man, he knows how to out-stare an audience after a funny line, waiting for it to sink in as Jack Benny did, which takes enormous confidence. Like Jo Jo’s material, kids do factor in, and Andy seems to get into trouble just being himself in the playground.
Carey Marx comes across as a bit stiff and uncomfortable but don’t be fooled by his tomfoolery. His audience antennae are always on as he switches deftly between topics. Carey’s mad word pictures of extended ridiculousness are painted with rusted-on irony. “We need more male feminists because women have done a shit job of it.” He gauges the audience and tests the material for boundaries and hopefully he finds none. He is absolutely delicious when on a roll. Carey appeared at the Adelaide International Comedy Gala at Thebarton early in February and his show, British Comedian, Carey Marx: The Dead Don’t Heckle is also on this final Fringe weekend.
I recommend all of them! It’s the last weekend of the Fringe and these comics would be a great way to turn off the lights.
David Grybowski
When: 17 Feb to 18 Mar
Where: Belgian Beer Café ‘Oostende’ - Upstairs
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Hell's Kitchen at Rhino Room. 17 Mar 2023
Reuben Solo is a rarity. His comedy has a unique style all of its own, and it’s not merely about telling jokes which would be lamentably formulaic. His own publicity describes his humour as “off-beat”, and it is certainly that: it is eccentric, unconventional (thank the lord!), and intelligent.
Reuben Solo’s curiously titled show Palindrome doesn’t rely on vulgarity and bad language, but it does turn sharp observation and oh-so-funny acidic comment on the seemingly ordinary things we do and the trite things we say in our daily lives, which, when unpacked, border on being meaningless. By way of illustration, Solo seizes on the debut single What Makes You Beautiful by British-Irish boy band One Direction. The song includes the lyric ‘You don't know you're beautiful, oh oh / That's what makes you beautiful’, and Solo examines this in hysterical detail. If she did know, Solo asks, then she wouldn’t be beautiful, and so she mustn’t be told, because if she is told then she’d know and she’d no longer …. you get the idea! This gag goes on and on for some time, and as it ludicrously and hilariously unfolds, and becomes more and more convoluted, the audience is falling about the place with tears rolling down their faces. Literally. And all the time, Solo has a dead pan look on his face, with an occasional wry smile.
Solo loves paradoxes, and his show is brimming with hilarious examples. He talks about skydiving, and the nature of the backup safety parachute. He quips with a playful glint in his hypnotic eyes that there isn’t a third parachute because it is assumed the backup parachute is failsafe. So why isn’t it the primary one, Solo asks? Again, Solo harvests this gag for all its worth, and although it seems we are falling down a bottomless rabbit hole like Alice, it truly doesn’t get tiresome, and it seems our well of laughter is also endless.
Audience interaction is one of the basics of a classy comedian’s bag of tools, but Solo does it differently. He gives a very funny Ahn Do brush with fame demonstration, but his guest is someone from the audience. Solo asks the guest questions, listens very carefully to the answers and steers the conversation in surprising ways. His guest is all the time surprisingly comfortable and unwittingly gives up personal titbits that Solo uses to advantage. The final result is side splittingly funny. In another routine, Solo ‘sabotages’ the microphone that his guest used, and the repartee takes on a very distinctive and hilarious direction.
So, why Palindrome? This reviewer surmises that Reuben Solo delights in dissecting what people say and do, and then putting it all back togetheragain in order to expose its essence. But as he reassembles it, unlike a palindrome, the process is not perfectly reversible, and this is one of the kernels of his comedy.
Reuben Solo comes across as self-deprecating and humble, or is he? What if he was? Whatever...… his material is excellent, and his (next) show is not to be missed!
Kym Clayton
When: 17 to 18 Mar
Where: Rhino Room
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Goodwood Theatre. 17 Mar 2023
Written and performed by Ty Autry, A Southern Fairytale is not an unfamiliar story, sadly. It is about a young, gay Christian growing up in a small and out-of-the way town in Georgia, in the ‘deep south’ of the USA, and coming to terms with the way God has made him in an intolerant society. The very expression itself – ‘deep south’ – is enough to warn us this is not going to be a pleasant story, and it isn’t.
The use of the term ‘fairytale’ in the title of the show is not just a nod to its gay themes; it also points to the fact there is eventually a happy ending (oops….no pun intended!). Fairytales usually involve a central hero/heroine who is rewarded for successfully carrying out various challenges and in A Southern Fairytale the hero is named Alex Belmont, and he is played by Autry. Belmont is Autry, for this is an autobiographical one-hander – it is Autry’s own turbulent story.
The play unfolds chapter by chapter and Alex recounts all the usual milestones in the life of a young gay man: his first crush, his parents finding out he is gay, punishments, confusion, bullying, ostracism, anger, acceptance, retreating back into the closet, masquerading as heterosexual, dealing with gossip and innuendo, and the list goes on. As previously said, this is familiar territory, and of course it is not just confined to the ‘deep south’, but they excel at cruelty. And it gets worse. The story also delves into Alex’s excommunication from his church, him being sent to conversion therapy, and dealing with a disturbed father who thinks the root course of his son’s problem is him being possessed by a demon!
Autry explores the ‘routine’ events with sincerity – after all, it’s his own lived experience – but he shies away from deeply looking into the more toxic aspects, such as conversion therapy, and this is perhaps the Achilles’ heel of the show. People can be crushed by the obscene, repugnant, and immoral practice of conversion therapy. It is blight. Some survive it, as did Autry, and their stories need to be told. The inclusion in the text of richer descriptions of conversion therapy experiences would undoubtedly make for a much weightier theatrical experience, but Autry’s not insubstantial performance skills are surely up to the task of tempering the bleak with drollness and ‘light and shade’.
As Belmont, Autry is totally likeable. He moves around the minimalist set comfortably and engages with every member of the audience at various times. It feels very intimate. He directs a smile to a woman, and a pained and penetrating look to her husband. A sharp glance here, a quizzical look there. There is the occasional silence while he waits for laughter to fall away, but the silence is also poignant, almost heart-breaking.
As with all fairytales, our hero safely comes out the other side. Autry is certainly a little damaged, but he looks forward with wonderment and anticipation to the next fairytale to see what life has in store for him.
A Southern Fairytale has been around for several years. It is performed with style, sincerity, humour, wit, charm, and much confidence. Autry might now consider applying his talents to refreshing the script to ensure that it transcends the familiar and becomes an even more important weapon in the ongoing struggle against homophobia, especially in the increasingly conservative US where anti-queer legislation is a growth industry.
Kym Clayton
When: 17 to 18 Mar
Where: Goodwood Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Kidd Pivot in association with Eponymous. 17 Mar 2023
Canadian mob Kidd Pivot have been a long-standing force for entertaining entanglements of dance with theatre. In Revisor, the highly credentialed artistic director, Crystal Pite, and Writer-in-Residence Jonathon Young have created a cracker situation in re-interpreting Russian Nikolai Gogol’s 1836 play, The Government Inspector, utilising all manner of theatrical trickery.
Gogol apparently was surprised his deep and meaningful tale was interpreted as farce, which is how everybody ever since treats it, except for an expressionistic Russian production nearly 100 years ago and its descendants. But Pite and Young have positively supercharged it. Brilliantly costumed like their egos, the village bureaucrats are anxious about the news of an inspector from headquarters checking up on them. The mirth is non-stop as they mistake a penurious minor official for the inspector, who readily accepts bribes and largess from the gormless rubes.
The opening combination of dance, acting, and voice on a minimalist and moody set accompanied by chiaroscuro lighting and tension-laden original music is absolutely thrilling to behold. Bravo! The dancer/actors exaggerate and angulate with crisp precision. Individuals morph into swarms and tableaus are swept away as fast as they are formed. And here’s the kicker; whilst the performers mouth their words, their voices are dissociated with slight mistiming recreating everything funny about a bad Zoom meeting. The whole thing was a feast.
And then everything changes. Smack in the middle of the show is a very long tranche of modern dance de rigueur in comfortable clothing and abstraction to convey Gogol’s more serious points about corruption of the soul. It is enervating and while well executed and a thrill for the pure dance fans, it misses the theatrical panache of the first segment.
Eventually, the devices of the opening scenes return and the focus is on the letter, but the delicious fright on the faces of the bureaucrats when the real inspector is announced is missing. Nonetheless, the excellence of the performances both on stage and by the voice artists are unchallengeable. And Crystal Pite’s choreography and direction are awesome. The whole shebang is technically extraordinary to watch but it’s two speed format was peculiar.
David Grybowski
When: 17 to 19 Mar
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Jack & Jill’s Basement Bar. 15 Mar 2023
Eric is a former submariner with Her Majesty’s Navy. He served on nuclear submarines and has signed the Official Secrets Act, which prevents him from disclosing any information that might be against the interests of the British state. So, what can fifty minutes of ‘tale telling’ by a submariner really get into? Well, as it turns out – lots, and its intriguing and funny.
The show is billed as comedy/storytelling, but it’s not stand-up, which is a blessing in disguise, because if it were it might well have inevitably slipped into gratuitously bad language and sexual innuendo. This show has none of that. Rather, it is a heartfelt and genial rendering of Eric’s time in the Royal navy and the adventures he has experienced. And there are lots of those: some very funny, others achingly sad (but usually with a well-timed rib-tickling punchline!), and one or two that are genuinely distressing.
Eric’s description of his initial training, especially about how to escape a submarine, are jaw dropping. The stories he tells are richly described – you almost feel you are there but are glad you aren’t! – and they come thick and fast.
Eric is a generous and warm fellow, and you can believe that the safety of the free world was in good hands when he was below the waves. He has a free and inclusive style with the audience, and it seems there might always be former servicemen and women at his shows. They keep him sincere (but I don’t think he has a dishonest bone in his body!) and can be heard muttering agreement and endorsement of his reflections.
When the show was over, I walked back up the stairs in the daylight with a smile on my face and better appreciation of the life of a submariner – with its danger, deprivations, mateship, and salty humour – but all the time glad that it was never me!
Kym Clayton
When: 15 to 18 Mar
Where: Jack and Jill’s Basement Bar
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au