★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Powersuit Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 7 Mar 2023
This is a cracker of a play and performance! Because the revelation of information is so exquisitely written - so subtly moving under the radar of action - you may want the same experience I had by approaching it with little foreknowledge.
Safe to say housemates – a vivacious young woman and witty homosexual – are cosily comfortable in their flat, which takes on a kind of Covid self-isolation. Their portals to their surrounding urban universe are via their regular podcast to an army of followers and the occasional foray to work and dating entanglements. They cuddle and converse like never-ending friendship. Everything is OK until something goes wrong and the characters are profoundly tested.
Playwright Laura Jackson is highly credentialed and experienced. Most of her creativity focusses on women’s experiences with street harassment, domestic violence (ie: not safe anywhere), online privacy and fertility. Jackson notes that The Culture was first written in 2014 but is now tweaked for today, and things are only worse since Rosie Batty was Australian of the Year.
Laura Jackson has written a completely modern play that mirrors urbanites aged 20s or so with complete veracity – a complex milieu of connection and trepidation. Jackson also plays the young female with effervescent exuberance, a-teeter between confidence and fragility. Mina Asfour is a theatre creative working out of Western Sydney. His performance is like none at all – so realistic and natural. Together, their characters’ friendship, loyalty and spats make for an easy verisimilitude.
The original production was directed in New York by Bethany Caputo and made ready for the current tour by Carly Fisher. The detail in the direction fosters the pace and the poignancy. A screen showing phone texts and podcasts is extremely useful.
There is a message about domestic violence but the narrative focusses on the damage and the response, not on the perpetrator, and we cheer our dynamic duo for making good decisions.
A terrific tale told with delectable realism. Bravo!
P.S. The Robson Jackson Foundation supports a charity in each city of their tour; in Adelaide, it is the Western Adelaide Domestic Violence Service (part of Women’s Safety Services SA). The foundation will match donations of up to $2000 in each city - $10,000 in total. Get onto it.
David Grybowski
When: 7 to 16 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres – The Arch
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★
Adelaide Fringe. Lisa Angove. Star Theatres. 6 Mar 2023
The program opines that the Irish playwright and novelist, Samuel Beckett, is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th Century. While he obviously was an important writer and the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1969, there are few who have gone inside people’s heads in theatre the way Beckett has.
Footfalls is grim viewing. The action is minimalist: a middle-aged woman in decrepit condition simply paces across the front of the stage dressed in a ragged and worn dressing gown, or worse. Occasionally she stops to converse with an older voice that we identity at that of her mother.
Lisa Angove’s woman is a study of pitiable pain and confusion. But she never changes it up to signal the distinct parts of the play as outlined by Beckett. Her grimaces are awesome but tiresome. Angove too often attacks the lines with screeches and loses fidelity. Some of the staging elements evoking symbolic representations of Beckett’s themes are awol, so the show is even more minimalist than even Beckett imagined. The Beckett estate has been known to close down reprises that don’t obey the stage notes with precision, so how did they get away with that?
The direction by Phil Roberts is derived from Ralph Wilson’s direction in some way. Even the program notes are Wilson’s. The mother’s voice – Joyce Glynn – is recorded on scratchy old media and irritating pauses occur betwixt the live and recorded components. Her intonation is the ticket.
If you don’t know Beckett, this production might scare you off forever. But you’ll have fun figuring out what the heck is going on.
David Grybowski
When: 6 to 10 Mar
Where: Star Theatres – Star Theatre Two
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Casey Jay Andrews and Joanne Hartstone. 5 Mar 2023
The title promises something spooky or sinister. Prior to the performance, writer and actor Casey Jay Andrews explains to the audience the basics of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse found in the Book of Revelations, but it’s drawing a long bow to link either of these to her more tame narrative.
Casey is an accomplished and clear raconteur and ideally suited to tell her tale. She writes with the familiar device of simultaneously advancing disparate anecdotes that blossom into stories and you guess the connection. The stories are familiar and warm-hearted but what little that is dramatically at stake for the protagonists is tempered by humour at the fancy of their actions. Casey’s enthusiasm thus seems over-egged and it’s all very cute. They say it’s best to write what you know; all the principal characters are female, even the horse, and the few males are not very nice. The ending is tied together like a parcel and presented to you as a gift.
And by the way, horses aren’t saddled up in their stalls waiting for someone to steal them.
David Grybowski
When: 2 to 12 Mar
Where: Treasury 1860 - Courtyard
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Cirkidz. The Peacock @ Gluttony. 5 Mar 2023
Wow. Just wow. This is Cirkidz?
They were good in previous productions, for instance last Fringe’s offering Ropeable, but this is next level. Cirkidz is not just speaking up; it’s speaking a whole new language. It’s a harder, sharper language, working on that nebulous area between the body and the brain. The conversation is big, bold and at times brassy. It’s vulnerable, and it’s questioning.
Mettle is a new circus show and apparently “explores the mental toughness and passion that propels you toward achieving your vision for life”.
I’m never sure about these vague descriptions of shows – if you didn’t see them written down you would be clueless half the time, and just enjoy the production for the visual performances. Because there is certainly plenty of that!
But this time, there is a spoken narrative. It comes after you’ve settled down a bit, after you’ve noted that this is a step beyond what you’ve seen them do before. It all starts to shift shape a little, to make its own sense, to cement your suspicion that you’re seeing something special. The body and the brain. The connections. The disconnections. The pain. The passion. The laughter. The despair.
The ensemble work is exemplary. While there are some standout performers, there are no stars. The troupe work together, each forming part of the whole – there are no passengers here. And the athleticism is remarkable. They have honed their craft; movements are not left to dangle in the air or slide to a slow stop, they are sharp, clean, precise. Feet and arms stop when and where they should, incising the space before moving on.
Mettle also notes “that if you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, you will light that sucker up yourself”. The light is used as motif for a number of the vignettes and the strength of these performers’ - body and brain – just shines through.
There’s plenty of humour to be had here as well – the ‘don’t touch the sweets’ routine is both hilarious and impressive, as the artists contort those bodies under and over themselves. Musical skills are also on show, as some of the cast take to the bass, keyboard and percussion for a beautifully performed vocal piece.
There is so much more to be said here – the seesaw routine is exciting, thrilling and unmissable. Towers of chairs have you holding your breath, and red cotton string will have you chuckling.
One often hears young people described as the performers (or audience) of the future. Forget that. These are the performers of now. They’re match fit, and the show is exemplary. Congratulations Cirkidz. With reference to another of the amazing routines, you’ve nailed it!
Arna Eyers-White
When: 13 Mar
Where: The Peacock at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Holden Street Theatres. 4 Mar 2023
Having seen Janet Swain’s solo show last week (Delphi Goes Bassooning is a singular triumph) it comes as no surprise that I should follow up with a viewing of her band performance, four women of sequins and sass from the Northern Rivers region of NSW who go by the name of The Loveys.
It is worth noting that the bassoon does make an appearance! There is a fabulous moment when Janet performs a solo, propping her foot up on the fold-back front of stage, flashing legs and channeling the like of Hole’s Courtney Love. Not often noted as an instrument of cabaret performance its place in The Loveys’ line-up appears ridiculously natural alongside the bass guitar (Pamela), percussion (Belinda) and beautiful white ukulele (Jenny). These days there is always a ukulele, though Janet rounds the sound out with keyboard. There is also, of course, a full complement of vocals, subject to a few vagaries and blurts in the sound before being largely sorted.
And the show itself? A loose take on life as a mature woman, seeking love and seeking friends and seeking sex. Three of the four have been divorced or outlived their partners, so rich experiences form part of the between-song patter, and more intimate reflections are used to build the narrative of the songs themselves. Songs of love and loss, all beautifully rendered, some hilariously so.
Spinster Daughter reclaims the term as a positive; Daddy Joined the Circus sees Belinda joining Jenny on the uke for some lovely picking; Sex at 72 has a number of mature women in the audience cackling with recognition. There’s a cover song in there as well; The Loveys pay homage to Sia Furler and the brilliant Chandelier – the song of freedom gets the twin uke attack and some complex vocal harmonics.
It is almost exactly what one might expect from four women (aging up to 72, if you’re asking) and their take on the personal side of life. There is no politics, no particular world-view, it is not that sort of cabaret. But the insights, the humour, the camaraderie are all real and powerful.
Have I Left It Too Late? they opine in one of their songs. Judging by this performance, absolutely not.
Arna Eyers-White
When: Closed
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: Closed