Joh Hartog Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 19 May 2023
Two lovely leather couches loom large on stage set in a tastefully designed bit of room, maybe a swish hotel room. We are confronted with a brash and rudely robust American looking like a modern Sioux shaman counterposed with an effete Englishman swirling a glass of rosé – a sanguine metaphor that turns bloody awful.
A play is under discussion and the London director and Hollywood star are waiting for the playwright to complete a perfectly volatile triangle. Before she arrives, some compromising discussion about women betrays toxic masculinity in two flavours. But the female Northern Irish playwright - initially giddy upon meeting the star - proves not to be trifled with.
Ulster American is not the script of the deceased Australian author David Ireland who won the Miles Franklin award three times; it belongs to the fully alive David Ireland who penned his award-winning script in 2018. Ireland may identify quite firmly as North Irish or Irish or British as his heroine in this play does. The author juxtaposes the gallimaufry of the Northern Irish conflict with condescending British attitudes and its bipolar politics. The script is fresh with post-Brexit confusion here echoing the dangerous Irish/English national and religious dichotomy. A very clever insight into modern British angst.
The US and UK persona, played a bit too formally yet lively by stalwarts Brendan Cooney and Scott Nell respectively, have a wonderfully robust tête-à-tête that creates a minefield of sexism. The vivacious playwright, played by the coruscating Cheryl Douglas, maneuvers the men into the minefield and Kaboom! Kaboom! as the tripartite of disagreement accelerates out of control, and the pretext of placation turns into a bloody mess.
Director and producer Joh Hartog moves his actors for effective physical emphasis of their colliding worlds, especially when the men gang up and pressurise the poor woman to get their way. The male characters are so awful, the performances seem on the verge of parody. There are so many great battles in this war of wills: bleak, black and terribly funny in a cringe-worthy way. It is exciting to watch the changing status change again until we have a winner. Have we come only this far in the 21st Century?
David Grybowski
When: 10 to 20 May 2023
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
State Opera of SA. Her Majesty’s Theatre. Pirates of Penzance and HMS Pinafore. 14 May 2023
G&S lovers can never have enough G&S.
Adelaide long has had a Gilbert and Sullivan Society which flourished in the non-professional arena with a seemingly bottomless resource of willing and able operatic talent. Up and comers honed their skills and deep-dived G&S while audiences thrived seeing excellent light opera productions at affordable prices.
It is not that this phenomenon has gone. It is just “resting” with the local G&S mob presenting some Broadway shows and other musical joys - because the great big, official, State Opera South Australia has stepped into its G&S territory.
And good on it!
G&S long has been thrust into a quaint nether-land of opprobrium by serious opera adherents. One could describe it as the bastard nephew of the classical champions, and while Verdi, Rossini, Wagner et al. have been revered in assorted languages and degrees of high theatricality, the comic common touch of these old British satirists has been generally demeaned.
This critic can attest to this with a big “then” through yesteryears and, disappointingly, some “now” elitists and purists one thought may have learned better.
G&S is funny. Worse still, it can be downright silly.
Hence the delight in Stuart Maunder leaving the SA Opera company with the parting gift of a massive and mighty G&S Festival - an intense array of G&S works.
It is a huge commitment from the company members. They have been called upon to double up all over the place, sometimes playing two roles in two different productions in one day.
This critic may attest to this, having attended Pirates of Penzance at the matinee and HMS Pinafore a few hours later in the evening. Thus comes this unusual, blended overview review.
For Pirates, a very neat proscenium set is boxed on Her Majesty’s stage with lights outlining the name of the show. It opens with the Pirate King whooping into sight and cuing the curtain. This is to be the beginning of a new love affair with Ben Mingay, the crown jewel of State Opera, a performer who oozes star quality.
He’s a heavenly, diabolical, and very funny Pirate King. And his comic timing comes to the fore again in HMS Pinafore when he embodies the impossibly pompous Sir Joseph Porter. Indeed, he is the best Porter this critic has seen in quite a slew of Pinafores through the years, albeit it is a mystery as to why State Opera makeup caked his nose in suppurating sunburn sores. The vanity of Mingay’s Sir Joseph overrides his disfigurement with endless preening and posturing, highly exaggerated, but never over the top. And, of course, he sings like a dream.
Back on the Pirates stage, he’s butch and athletic amid his motley crew.
As the Pirate King, he comes up against the other particularly posh G&S stereotype, Major General Stanley who is delivered in an award-worthy performance by Douglas McNicol. McNicol is possessed of a mighty bass voice and a tongue twistable enough for the notorious string-of-eruditions song: "I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical // About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news // With many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse…”
Like Mingay, McNicol springs again into action for the evening operetta. He is Deadeye Dick in Pinafore, and about as scruffy and ugly as he is sleek and fanciful in Pirates.
The double bill phenomenon is an extraordinarily rare chance to see this sort of versatility and Maunder certainly has pushed his performers to the far reaches of professional excellence.
Pirates features the heroine of Mabel, the most beautiful of the Major General’s daughters with whom the handsome apprentice pirate Frederic is to fall in love. He’s played with comic panache by John Longmiur with Desiree Frahn soprano-trilling to utter perfection as sweet Mabel. She is equipped with a stage presence almost as bewitching as that lovely voice.
With all these characters, quirky musical numbers, and quite ridiculous plotlines, one realises that G&S is all to be taken with very large pinches of salt. These works are satirical. They abound in digs at political and societal issues, the currency of which remains alive today. Hence the popular endurance of G&S.
HMS Pinafore has a lot of fun with authority, its inept police force with their “catlike tread” having kept audiences in gusts of laughter for a century. And still so, right now at Her Majesty’s.
Both shows are superbly choreographed with lots of quirky added details.
Indeed, Maunder has turned on a luscious treat all round. He has secured that living legend of costume design, Roger Kirk for the costumes and, in extremes, from plain seamen in stripes to the exquisite Jessica Dean clad in a delicacy of a shimmering romantic gown as Pinafore’s gorgeous Josephine, it is a showcase of excellence and finesse.
Never could it more truly be said that “the frocks are lovely” on a stage full of swirling full skirts and petticoats. Even Antoinette Halloran’s two comedy characters, Little Buttercup in Pinafore and the piratical nurse in Pirates, are clad in a splendour of whirling fabric and, if one looks closely, some clever character detail. Halloran has two big roles to deliver and she does so with immense vigour and wit.
One may strew compliments throughout the State Opera cast, not forgetting Nicholas Cannon, Jeremy Kleeman and Nicholas Jones as that handsome Pinafore hero. What a crisp, rich tenor he is.
Conductors Anthony Hunt and James Pratt deserve all the applause they attract at curtain call. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra responds beautifully to their batons.
All the production values merit a big tick - none more than Maunder whom one salutes as he ticks off.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 21 May
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings - Pirates: premier.ticketek.com.au
Bookings - Pinafore: premier.ticketek.com.au
University of Adelaide Theatre Guild. Little Theatre. 5 May 2023
The Wonderful World of Dissocia is an incredibly vivid, heartwarming and heart-rending - and where useful, quirky and humorous - exploration into an illness of the mind. In the program notes, director Tom Filsell openly opines his sojourn with getting back on track dodging his own dark spaces. If you don’t think you are on a spectrum of some sort, you are probably kidding yourself and missing opportunities to empathise with those who have been nudged a little more along the continuum than you. Filsell has done a great service by offering Adelaide this opportunity to forgive ourselves, understand each other and heal.
Scottish playwright Anthony Neilson has a reputation for confrontational theatre and has written enough plays over 30 years to fill a computer screen. …Dissocia is smack in the middle in 2004 and won the Critics’ Award for Theatre in Scotland for best play.
The production might be best enjoyed if you just go, it’s great, take my word for it, and revel in the reveal of the clever writing and brilliant performances. STOP READING NOW AND BUY A TICKET!
However, if you have the mental condition where you must know exactly what you are in for and take no risks, read on.
In the first half, we get a look inside Lisa’s head ala Samuel Beckett, only way more interesting and less stodgy and esoteric. Having taken Psychology 101, I diagnosed Lisa with a psychosis and couldn’t understand her dissocation from the colourful mayhem going on in there. D’oh! Dissociation. I get it. In the second half, we go through the looking glass into Lisa’s rollercoaster ride of on-the-drugs and off-the-drugs, the hated side effects and the even worse outcomes for loved ones. The condition looks rather fun compared to subjugation through medication.
The huges success of this production is the copious workshopping that was undertaken to realise Neilson’s script with scant stage instructions. The playwright worked with actors in originating the play and the same research, reflection, self-examination and spontaneity has been fetched by this director and cast, and the ensemble work is joyous and thoughtful.
In the first half, Filsell and actor Nadia Talotta recreate a sort of Dorothy in Oz or Alice in Wonderland with Lisa as she travels places populated with fantastical people and experiences, some of them scary. And did we ever think these young women had dissocia? The set is full of lighting trickery, highly styled costumes, outrageous props and actors delighting in expressive abstraction. Lisa’s dissocia has her respond with the equanimity of Mario in the original Super Mario digital game - trips up, dusts off and keeps going without emotional engagement. Not really in the real world. Talotta is a Jedi warrior of performance – a NIDA graduate, and it shows.
The second half is in contrast, sober, or more like the morning after a binge – in the realm of morbid hospitalization. The theatre expediency of doubling up roles for actors carries a strong message of how the brain works its dreamlike imagery in this show. Using the Oz analogy, the scarecrow, the cowardly lion and the tin man have real life persona.
Sound design by Nick Butterfield, Abi Steele’s scenic design and prop making, Gillian Cordell’s costumes, and Stephen Dean’s lights are all necessary goods contributing to a fulsome theatre experience.
The workshopping resulted in super realistic performances when naturalism is required manifested in playful banter, overtalking and speechless signalling. The script is thusly reinvented by the team. I was especially moved when Paul Pacillo as Lisa’s partner and Talotta as Lisa both realise the impact of unhealthy behaviour on each other - the one inside trying to look out and the other outside trying to look in. A moment of great pathos that summed up what this production was trying to achieve. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 4 to 14 May
Where: The Little Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
Matt Lombardo. Holden Street Theatre Company. 4 May 2023
Screen star Tallulah Bankhead (Martha Lott) has been called into the studio to loop (we say overdub) a line from her last film. This does not happen to plan.
Three things start to assert themselves in the difficult working relationship between Tallulah, stand in sound director Danny (Chris Asimos) and off-stage sound tech Steve (Robert Cusenza). The careful reveal of Tallulah and Danny’s inner realities, fantasies, and sense of self.
This trio of conflicting, interleaved life complexes are brilliantly managed in Director/Set Designer Peter Goers’ sublime, riveting directorial reading of Matthew Lombardo’s deceptively rich Looped.
Tallulah, the famed flaming torch bearer of rebellious living, is not having a bar of time-stressed Danny’s strict get to work attitude. He wants out of that studio as fast as possible.
Tallulah wants to drag this assignment out. She does so with fantastic, no holds barred, overbearing control that Danny is largely incapable of fighting.
Lott’s Tallulah is on a mission. Herself, her image, her all-consuming power over everything and everyone around her. Lott’s creation of character is extraordinary in its sheer fierceness and superb, delicately balanced delivery of zinging lines ensuring dramatic power in them is equal to comedic effect.
Goers’ sound studio set is intrinsic to facilitating the physical dynamic between the characters. These characters, though extreme opposites, nonetheless have and express the need to own the space around them which is absolutely crucial to work’s success.
The sparring between the two pushes Danny into defensive mode as Tallulah starts poking around Danny’s personality, as she perceives it. Danny isn’t afraid to snap back.
Asimos’s Danny is a tightly strung coil of barbed wire. He holds himself in tighter and tighter as Tallulah keeps getting closer and closer to his protected inner self. The intense emotional rawness of this struggle is superbly developed over two acts. The first act only scrapes the surface of the larger-than-life star and 9 to 5 straight-laced film editor, the second act goes much deeper and reveals the unexpected.
Robert Cusenza’s off stage role, Steve, is a terrific piece of comic business. Cusenza creates a deep sense of character and personality to Steve that feels like that of a surprised voyeur.
The second act is easily the most challenging of the work; breaking down these two strong personalities to their actual reality. It is done with such fine control. Pauses in the right place and perfect placement on stage. Never once does the pace falter, a line fall the wrong way, or a moment of doubt creep in. It is spell binding and kicks in with one gently delivered line from Tallulah.
Rare are opportunities to see Martha Lott on stage. More wonderful is the return of Chris Asimos after injury. Perfectly paired they are for the challenge of this work.
Here is that much sought after thing, the perfect production.
David O’Brien
When: 2 to 20 May
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
State Theatre Company South Australia. The Space Theatre. 3 May 2023
Playwright Duncan Macillan is probably best known for co-writing the stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 a few years back. He also penned People, Places and Things to get the discussion going on drug and alcohol addition and recovery. That went so well – Best New Play at the Olivier Awards in 2015. But before that, he tackled suicidality with a short story that he subsequently developed with co-writer and British comedian, writer and performer, Jonny Donahue into Every Brilliant Thing. Donahue has played the role in this one-hander 600 times, but in Adelaide, Jimi Bani smashes it with his sensitive, quirky, kind and gently wry expressiveness. Bani made his formidable presence known in State’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? last year.
Reading the playwrights’biographies, along with that of local director, Yasmin Gurreeboo, they are like-minded in their strong desires to deliver meaningful theatre about the hardest issues of personal tragedy with an ardent belief that theatre ought to be transformational.
Every Brilliant Thing is absolutely charming and engaging in its concept and execution. Jimi Bani, simply by entering the stage, has the audience in the palm of his hand. We see a young boy’s introduction to unfathomable unhappiness complete with incomprehension, guilt and an aching desire to help. Help comes in the form of writing down every brilliant thing in the world. A list to show Mum life is worth living. The list starts: 1, and an audience member calls out a brilliant thing. Then 2, 3, 4…531, 532…789… more brilliant things; you guess how many. They are not all spoken, of course, but you get the drift. The boy has counselling at school by a councillor’s hand puppet so he is reached. The boy grows up and the list gets longer. Her love life blossoms but there is a shadow. 11,278…11,279. Mum has a second attempt. 538,675, 538,676…
The theatre space is set up with bleachers on four sides, and the lights are kept on throughout. There is nowhere to hide. Audience members are selected in the most solicitous, non-threatening way to participate as say, the father, the girlfriend, the mother…no, she is never seen. The fight or flight mode get switched off and audience members are amazingly co-operative and even helpful. Everybody loves what’s going on.
And it wouldn’t be this way without Jimi Bani’s gifts. He’s a rather large man with a great sense of rhythm shown by enviable dance steps in a plethora of styles and, you would think it’s not possible to demonstrate a love of music without actually loving music. There are plenty of tunes because our life - everyone’s life it seems - is signposted with songs. He even got a young woman to get down on one knee and propose to him in their characters. By this time, I think anybody in the swooning audience would have done anything for him. There is a euphoria of participation and eager to laugh and a few moments later to wipe away a tear from the warmth or the sadness in sympathy with the struggle.
The script moves between amusement and message with ease. There is a showstopping, “Don’t do it,” and then on the play travels to some Lifeline advice and inbetween there is the excitement of the list. Bani and Gurreeboo know when to pause, to laugh, to bring the audience into the intimacy, to encourage an understanding of the ramifications of suicide on the remaining loved ones symbolised by this man’s experience from seven and for a lifetime.
This is my second State Theatre opening this week – the other being Prima Facie – and both earned enthusiastic standing ovations. I am with them. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 28 Apr to 13 May
Where: The Space Theatre
Bookings: my.statetheatrecompany.com.au