★★★★★
Holden Street Theatres’ Edinburgh Fringe Award ’22 with Lawrence Batley Theatre, KETCHUP Predictions, and Richard Jordan Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 15 Feb 2023
Hints of the strange are there. Subtle, and not so subtle.
Biggest hint? Boarded up window from the inside with white lacy curtains drawn closed. Smallest hint? Relief shadow on the wall where a crucifix once hung.
Medium hint? This tall young man draped in women’s string tie dressing gown and pyjama shorts who addresses the audience with sunshine bright warm familiarity, raising a glass of champagne announcing buoyantly, “I’m Daniel Valentine, and it’s my 18th Birthday!”
Well, that doesn’t seem so bad. So the audience settles in as Daniel proceeds to tell his story. He’s bubbly, shiny, vaudeville vivacious gliding about the drab room as if to soften the impact of that boarded up window (and what it might mean).
Daniel’s life seems a tough but exciting one, also sad. His brilliant, supportive, dominant, divorced Mother, parish Church life and difficult school life seem in balance.
Along comes the countervailing influence of singer Jane McDonald. Suddenly, Mother and son, devoted Christian believers in the rapture, have a new saviour, Daniel’s story starts turning distinctly grey, charcoal to outright black.
Director/writer Phillip Stokes’ tightly written script is given the most sensational interpretation by Jack Stokes as Daniel, aided by Annie May Fletcher’s subtle sound design and Craig Lomas’s suggestive set and lighting.
Jack Stokes holds the audience with a maturity of stage craft expected of an actor 20 years his senior. He manages giving life to a little boy and a late teen in crisis effortlessly. There is joyousness even amidst the most deranged of experiences and circumstances. It is an utterly hypnotising experience. You want to, but cannot deny the darkness of this life revealed. You stay hooked, right to the end. Because you just can’t look away. Daniel is just too engaging.
David O’Brien
When: 14 Feb to 19 Mar
Where: The Studio – Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Fishamble: The New Play Company in association with Sunday’s Child and Joanne Hartstone. Holden Street Theatres. 15 Feb 2023
Mustard. Intense word. Intense colour. Intense sensation; transformed into a symbol of relationship loss, confusion, grief, addiction, passion and helplessness in Performer/Writer Eva O’Connor’s play.
O’Connor’s writing is unapologetically tough with light moments of softness. The structure is so strong and taut with a poetry of hardness belying vulnerable depth.
Director Hildegard Ryan’s production offers a stark angular approach in performance, stripped back in every way.
Simple lighting with still spots from Marianne Nightingale allied to a focus on the sharp eye-gripping colour of O’Connor’s costume; a red mustard hoodie and track pants. Not to mention jars of bright yellow mustard.
In language redolent with powerful imagery and emotion offered in gutsy stoicism, O’Connor traces a relationship journey spinning around her religious Mother and strong, wealthy, cool and happening English professional cyclist.
The Irish girl trying to sort herself out. The beautiful English boy who lives in a real castle.
A tricky combination. An obsessive athlete capable of momentary deep tenderness. A girl in awe of it. In thrall to hard physicality, deepness of spirit.
It slowly collapses. Rather, turns to mustard.
Illogical that seems. Emotionally it’s so deeply accurate, this obsessive, psychologically debilitating sense of dissolution of self, security and confidence into mustard.
This journey into a poetic, frightening madness is transfixing in its utterly uncompromising certainty and bull headed destructiveness. Never letting up. Never giving an edge away, even in the clarity of moments something must give.
David O’Brien
When: 14 Feb to 19 Mar
Where: The Arch – Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
State Theatre Company South Australia. Dunstan Playhouse. 14 Feb 2023
The Goat brings an opening night to go down in the Adelaide history books.
It was a beautiful warm evening and even though having applauded through countless curtain calls, the audience was not flocking out into it.
Instead, the audience filled the foyer in a deafening crush of wild animation. It had just experienced a benchmark production of one of the world’s most outrageously provocative and devilishly witty plays. It was on a high.
Edward Albee’s The Goat or Who is Sylvia? may well be modern STC’s piece-de-resistance production. Throwing a thesaurus of superlatives at it would not be going too far. Nor would popping director Mitchell Butel onto a plinth.
Of course, there are three major stars involved in this triumph.
Claudia Karvan may shed any fleeting doubt she had about returning to the live theatre. Hers is a breathtaking performance. She portrays Stevie, the hapless good wife dealing not only with the exposure of her husband’s infidelity but the mindboggling fact that “the other woman” is a goat called Sylvia. Karvan produces an impressive palette of emotions, her reactive versatility extending to extremely compelling facial twitching. That’s a totality of physicality from an actor. But, her role also calls for clowning as her character thrashes through incredulity, fury, and heartbreak; Karvan can do that, too. And, with that strong, sharp voice, she etches every word into the auditorium with clarity.
Nathan Page parries, his voice husky with emotion as he delivers confessional torrents in the role of Martin, a husband as adamant about his stance as he is defensive.
It’s a war of incredulity, the passions periodically punctuated by grammatical corrections, stop, shock, and laugh moments in a torrid script. The playwright has drawn these characters as highly educated people with almost OCD pedantic streaks. It is delicious.
The director, meanwhile, has artfully used stillness in Page to heighten crumbling Martin’s emotional interplay, albeit that he is an actor of exceptional physical grace. Mark Saturno brings the bombastic element to the domestic hearth as Martin's TV interviewer-cum-best-friend, Ross. His is the voice of the outside world, while Yazeed Daher, as the gay teenage son, Billy, speaks for the cause of acceptable sexual diversity. Bestiality is not in its scope, and yet, while it appals, it is a thing.
In braving this issue, Albee has created a play which has continued to shock and fascinate audiences since 2002, provoking furious foyer discussions. The play has just kept on reaping awards in all directions. Some people are offended but most have recognised that this is a great classic tragedy, almost perfectly wrought, its dramatic roots reaching back to Greek mythology. And yet it is so funny, bitterly, shamefully, guffaw funny.
State’s expert production values sing their own beautiful song in this presentation. The sophisticated urbanity of Jeremy Allen’s slick New York set, with its with Frank Lloyd Wright-esque modernist chic, reflects the success and erudition of its occupants. Ailsa Paterson’s costumes, similarly, make the right notes with Karvan at first in a stunning pleated skirt which emphasises her femininity and social confidence and then in high-waisted striped lounging trousers which are just-so for the needs of a tortured clown. Again, right on the mark. As is Nigel Levings’ lighting plot, throwing day and night, ease and crisis into artful relief.
If the production continues with this excellence and momentum through its season, it is creating a laugh-and-cry entity which seriously needs to be experienced. From this critic, the message is: Do Not Miss It.
Samela Harris
When: 14 to 25 Feb
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
Bunbury Productions. Dunstan Playhouse. 1 Feb 2023
“This show is respectfully dedicated to the sexiest and most interesting people in the world: theatre critics.”
What can one say? What good taste from a cast of working thespians. And these are elderly thespians. They’ve been around. And around. At least two of them are household names. They should know.
Of course, their simpering adulation makes a critic smile.
Fortunately, so does their show.
Mono follows in the footsteps of the Senior Moment productions which easily packed theatres with seniors all too happy to make fun of the tedious frailties and foibles of turning old.
This one stars evergreen John Wood of Blue Heelers fame, living legend Max Gilles of the Max Gilles Reports and, would-be senior, Emily Taheny of Mad As Hell.
It is touted as a “three-person one-man show” since it consists of a series of monologues and solo skits.
Behind the scenes as director, script-writer and author of the outrageously comical program notes, is one Angus FitzSimons. Funny fellow. One imagines he probably has a PhD in serious silliness.
Certainly, in the hit-and-miss world of comedy skits, he delivers more hits than misses and there are laughs a-plenty, sometimes uproarious, sometimes chuckles.
The three stars are consummate professionals, as well they should be at their age. Their timing and delivery is impeccable. Taheny, who does an hilarious school principal's address and a wildly slosho mother-of-the-bride speech, not to mention an old new-age cliche-laden take on the quasi-Eastern rules of life, is not dependent on notes, being the new kid on the elderly block. The old fellows, however, have their scenes devised around unreliable memories. Gilles largely mimes with that beloved expressive face and Wood, with his finely resonating actor’s voice, reads from scripts.
The content is entirely simpatico with the use of notes and the stars pull it off with aplomb.
The audience adores them.
As for the critics? Praise be. They’re charmed.
Samela Harris
When: 1 to 5 Feb
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Bunbury Productions. Dunstan Playhouse. 1 Feb 2023
With Mono – A Three-Person One-Man Show, the not-so-long-in-years playwright and writer, Angus FitzSimons, has reprised his comical concerns for the gracefully and disgracefully aging clinging to their power that were evident in his 2019 hit, Senior Moments: The Complete Guide on How to Be Senior. And in case you missed Senior Moments…, you can buy the book! The productions also have in common two of Australia’s treasured acting assets: Max Gillies and John Wood. And in Mono, they are accompanied by the irrepressible Emily Taheny of current Mad as Hell fame.
I’ll start with the program because it was the funniest thing in the production. Bravo! Angus FitzSimons’ program reads and resembles a senior’s glossy magazine and, seniors! It was available at no extra charge! It’s crammed with loopy photos, fake reviews, Q&As, riddles, trivia tests, dubious information and useless advice. What a hoot! For example: “Q: What does F.A.Q. stand for? A: F.A.Q.’d if I know.”
As a comic vehicle, the show was more of a zimmer frame than a 280Z. The trio trot out in turn to do their shtick on a bare stage in front of a lectern, one at a time, often with notes. The skit characters vary from schoolmarm to conductor to a cutting vengeful speech from the mother of the bride. All had direct appeal and audience engagement and wonderfully developed characterisations. Emily Taheny seemed the brightest – might have been her costumes and hair changes – but more likely her refreshing emergence from the angry anarchy of absurdity conveyed by the Mad as Hell characters. John Wood fits into his policeman’s role from his long Blue Heelers engagement, reading out a whacky chain of evidence from the witness box, but even he could not save the auctioneer skit from tedium. Max Gillies is clearly the elder statesman and his facial gestures and body language speak volumes and still command the attention that they always have, especially where words aren’t spoken. His pathetic bumbling priest was heaven.
But Mono could also mean mono-tonous. All the skits were of the same pace as if an imaginary handbrake was on, and all themed of seniors lost or out of touch. There was no scene-setting music or visuals. And imagine having three of Australia’s great and proven talents on the same stage and not uttering a single word to each other? But this is an established and time-tested format. Of course, comedy wasn’t the only goal - poignancy and empathy was rife. How about Max’s character at the art gallery mistaking the fire protection gear on the wall for the artwork? That had it all, as did most of the expertly rendered writing.
A night of quiet chuckles and heart-warming reflections on what it’s like to be sagacious yet sidelined.
David Grybowski
When: 1 to 5 Feb
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: ticketek.com.au