★★★★★
Henry Naylor and Holden Street Theatres. Holden Street Theatres. 16 February 2022
English playwright, comedian and actor Henry Naylor is back with a world premiere (that’s code for a trial run before Edinburgh) at Holden Street Theatres. If you haven’t yet seen a Henry Naylor play in the Fringe, you can’t be interested in theatre. Since 2016, Naylor has brought us Echoes, Angel, Borders, Games and The Nights by Henry Naylor (very clever putting your name in the title). These have earned eight Adelaide Critics’ Circle awards, four Fringe awards for best theatre, a Pick of the Fringe award, and a fistful of Edinburgh Fringe awards. And let’s add Finding Bin Laden to the list.
There is a strong thematic link between most of these plays. They are compelling, hour-long action-packed thrillers often set in the miasma of the Middle East from Afghanistan to Syria to Mediterranean refugees, focusing on local heroes and hapless victims under a Western gaze. And when they are not, there is still a combative or martial theme comparing past with current events. But where did all this stuff come from?
AFGHANISTAN IS NOT FUNNY… is an autobiographical prequel to Naylor’s playwriting and a peek behind the curtain of theatrical creation. Naylor is a formidable storyteller in composition, oration, expression and compelling vocalisation.
It begins with 9/11. Naylor wants some photos as a backdrop to the first play on the theme, so he and Sam the photographer fly Kazakhstan Airlines to Kabul to meet a fixer organised by Phil, a friend at the BBC. As you do. What these guys do and see, and the risks they take, makes this the trip of a lifetime! It’s post-US invasion and after Kabul is “secured,” but the Taliban are still hanging around like ghosts. Our trio befriend some and steer clear of others. They visit hospitals, refugee camps, bombed-out neighbourhoods and a tank graveyard. Without a hint of irony, Naylor recounts how they drove up to the gates of Bagram air base and simply announce they want to take some pictures. As if, “they’re for our play. What’s the problem?”
In performance, Naylor expounds in a clear and commanding voice while Sam’s sepia-toned photos are displayed on an ample backscreen. The pics are a fascinating record of 20 years ago when this whole catastrophe was still fresh.
Naylor organises the anecdotes of his adventure through brief dialogues with his therapist who identifies four stages of project management maturation: unconscious incompetency, conscious incompetency, unconscious competency and conscious competency. Thankfully, Naylor flashes these labels on a screen because even he gets them muddled in monologue. These stages give structure to judgements like foolhardy, brave, naïve, conceited and dedicated. Director Martha Lott has Naylor moving between two desks with chairs and pub scenes, which establish some sense of place, but it’s the remarkable photos that leave you incredulous.
Back in London, Finding Bin Laden is re-written with new-found veracity and it’s a hit! The praise is noticed by Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, My Beautiful Laundrette, The Grifters, etc) and Hugh Grant, and the to-and-fro of nearly getting a movie underway is hysterically funny but ends with palpable disappointment. But with 34 international awards and off-Broadway runs in the bag, the Naylor juggernaut found its way.
Among all the things that happened to the tourists is a story of a girl rushing towards them with a bundle in her arms of unknown content at a hospital or camp. At the conclusion of the play and after lights out, Sam’s photo of this girl is shown. The image is far more horrific than the telling, and there is an uncomfortable juxtaposition of applause, Naylor’s curtain call and the photo. I recalled a scene from the play where Henry’s mate Sam says, “…you’re just interested in your story, not their story.” It’s all out there, honestly.
Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 15 to 27 Feb
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Gavin Roach Presents. Holden Street Theatres. 16 Feb 2022
What a very strange and haunting piece of theatre.
Zinnie Harris has written a time-and-place-warp play about love, posthumous recrimination and a somewhere-nowhere world of existential plurality.
It begins with two sea-drenched women on a beach. Their hired boat has sunk. Where are they? Is this a sand bar or an island?
And thus begins the exploration of time and place and, indeed, the variable possibilities of reality.
The women, Helen and Robyn, are partners; one is a geologist and the other an academic. They are anxious for rescue because they are dog-sitting at home. Helen, the geologist is charged with energy and positivity. She makes an SOS with their discarded wet clothes.
Rescue is inevitable because the owners of the sunken boat will want to find out where it went. Robyn is having dreamscape flashbacks of a flooding sink and doomful messages from her mother. Helen sees this as symptomatic of concussion.
There is a woman on the island with whom they try to communicate. It is all very enigmatic and they make no effort to follow her. Why, wonders the audience.
From English playwright Zannie Harris this is a plucky plunge into an underworld of existential theatre. One thinks of Godot and also Pinter as Robyn becomes immersed in a puzzle of repetitive sentence fragments, tearing at the soft edges of recollection.
And, one ponders how hard it must be for an actor to memorise these contemplative torrents of broken dialogue. There is a thread and it leads to a denouement. But nothing is easy in this work. It is perchance rather overwritten.
One may or may not agree with its sense of mystical possibilities or the philosophic wrist-wringing of this play, but one can’t deny that it is taking one into an oddly dangerous headspace.
It is delivered through the absolute commitment of the actors in a dark setting where just a crumpled stretch of plastics suggests the shore (Meg Wilson) and an evocative soundscape imposes the threats of an inimical sea (Sascha Budimski).
Under Nescha Jelk’s direction, the two actors define finely the contrasting psychologies which make up that strange beast called human love. Sarah Bos is admirable as right-brained Helen while Wendy Bos, possessed of a sublime stage voice, skilfully delivers the emotional motherlode of the play.
And, one gives those two actors an extra salute because they have performed for an arduous hour in wet clothes with wet hair on a wet stage.
Ah, but under a sublime lighting plot by Mark Oakley.
Samela Harris
When: 16 to 27 Feb
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Patrick Keating. Holden Street Theatres. 15 Feb 2022
Creative director Martha Lott of Holden Street Theatres has innovated again. Using loot from the Holden Street Theatres’ Edinburgh Fringe Award, she has brought to Adelaide four 70-minute film renditions of theatrical productions emanating from Vancouver, Canada, that were first shown at the 2021 Edinburgh Fringe. In today’s Covid-compromised world, this is another way to see world-class theatre as it can’t always come here by Qantas. Lott makes the viewing experience a very comfortable one with widely spaced comfy chairs - and side tables for your dinner and drinks purchased on site - facing a wall-mounted screen in a lovely room of a Hindmarsh heritage home.
Recidivist Patrick Keating grew up in a nice Irish Catholic family in Montreal but was attracted to drugs and the tribe that comes with them before he was even a teenager. He served time in a great number of penitentiaries for serious drug and robbery offences culminating in the armed variety. On the stage, he is captured behind the bars of chiaroscuro lighting and appears diminutive in denim pants, shirt and jacket reminiscent of prison garb.
Canadian prisons are no picnic. Not being a tough guy, he shares several survival strategies. Sometimes, be like a cat – arch your back, get your fur up and hiss. Or make yourself a small target, be invisible – a technique he learned avoiding questions in public school. Or make yourself useful; do a few favours that will be remembered. Sometimes even good old empathy works. That was in. Out was no picnic either. Prison habits persisted, like washing your fork and spoon and putting them in your back pocket, and a suspicion of plain, friendly chit chat. The pathos was palpable. You see, he never talked about freedom, like he didn’t know what to do with it.
Keating took advantage of a prison program where he requested a transfer to another province where he knew nobody – in faraway British Columbia. It was awful to leave his tribe, but it led to a mentor and performance and the man we see today.
Keating’s forte is not acting but, ironically given his history, honesty, and since he wrote of his own life, it works. But his compelling and ironically funny anecdotes – told in his wonderful Montrealer Irish-Canadian accent – are not the whole story. You soon find yourself gazing into his piercing clear hazel eyes during the close ups speculating on how Keating’s life of revolving door incarceration shaped him. You begin to understand his wariness, his sizing up of people for their threat potential, or how to eek out some small comfort from harshness. He was repeatedly released untrained for life outside and each time he returned to what he knew. But he did progress from his drug community to his prison community and finally to his theatre community. “They have my back.”
Keating has an awesome capacity to bring you right along with him on his life’s journey, to have you accompany him into the cell and hear the door slam. This is an intimacy with someone whose crimes only paid in memories both poignant and malevolent.
The filmed theatre concept shapes up better than you may think too, as all four of the shows use edited footage from multiple camera angles, like a proper film. But you can’t see the whole stage at once - the camera does all the focusing for you. The nervy interaction between audience and performer is missing and you can’t talk to them after the show. But are these disadvantages enough to keep you at home? No way.
The other three shows of the On Screen Program are: 1 Hour Photo, do you want what I have got? A Craigslist Cantata, and The Darlings: A Provocative Evening of Drag from Vancouver.
David Grybowski
When: 15 Feb to 20 March
Where: Holden Street Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Vancouver Asian Canadian Theatre. Ruby’s at Holden Street Theatres. 16 Feb 2022
Creative director Martha Lott of Holden Street Theatres has innovated again. Using loot from the Holden Street Theatres’ Edinburgh Fringe Award, she has brought to Adelaide four 70-minute film renditions of theatrical productions emanating from Vancouver, Canada, that were first shown at the 2021 Edinburgh Fringe. In today’s Covid-compromised world, this is another way to see world-class theatre as it can’t always come here by Qantas. Lott makes the viewing experience a very comfortable one with widely spaced comfy chairs - and side tables for your dinner and drinks purchased on site - facing a wall-mounted screen in a lovely room of a Hindmarsh heritage home.
Performer Tetsuro Shigematsu is a storyteller extraordinaire who has earned critical acclaim as a playwright, actor, filmmaker and Radio Canada broadcaster. All this experience, plus some thorough research, the gift of the educator (PhD), and the flair of the magician combine to give a most entertaining, informative and kinetic 70 minutes akin to a TED talk (in fact, he gave a TED talk in 2011).
Dr Shigematsu makes the point that Voyager carried messages to the universe, but he judged them bland and not representative of humankind. Instead of institutional history, why not a story of an individual that represents all of us? This is an idea also developed by Turkish Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orham Pamuk with his book The Museum of Innocence and accompanying physical museum in Istanbul. With ferocious physicalised flair complementing his Van Dyke beard and handlebar moustache, Shigematsu scientifically, forensically and chronologically dissects the remarkable life of Canadian-born Japanese Mas Yamamoto. Shigematsu has a lyrically sonorous voice very similar to David Suzuki and augments his fascinating narrative with projected historical pictures and live GoPro images of model objects used on stage. He’s rather busy and segues between scenes with some rather naff dancing.
Yamamoto’s story is the shameful story of the Canadian West Coast Japanese during World War II. 20,000 were rounded up because of their race and - without crime or even charge - were removed to camps located in interior BC to prevent possible collaboration with any potential Japanese war effort on Canada’s west coast. He was 14 and unfortunately his surname was the same as the Japanese admiral that bombed Pearl Harbor. Shigematsu makes the point that the Canadians had nearly a hundred years of rounding up and removal experience with the native people of Canada. A further injustice was that they were not allowed to return to their homes on the west coast until 1949 – 4 years after the war ended! And by that time, their fishing boats and homes were nearly completely confiscated.
But this isn’t a sad story as Yamamoto went on to reinvent himself a number of times and lived a bloody incredible life of education, business, marriage and kids. Shigematsu recorded 36 hours of interviews and replayed about 18 minutes of Yamamoto telling his own story, imprinted on a 33 rpm record, harking back to Voyager. And you are all ears.
This is a hugely compelling production of showmanship and science, history and humanity. And a warning of how racism and fearmongering in our current age of rumours of war still makes the world an unsettling place. A place where one’s security can be swept away in a blink, even in what you may think to be the most benign of nations, Canada. Bravo!
The filmed theatre concept shapes up better than you may think too, as all four of the shows use edited footage from multiple camera angles, like a proper film. But you can’t see the whole stage at once - the camera does all the focusing for you. The nervy interaction between audience and performer is missing and you can’t talk to them after the show. But are these disadvantages enough to keep you at home? No way.
The other three shows of the On Screen Program are: Inside/Out: A Prison Memoir, do you want what I have got? A Craigslist Cantata, and The Darlings: A Provocative Evening of Drag from Vancouver.
David Grybowski
When: 15 Feb to 20 March
Where: Ruby’s at Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
State Theatre Company South Australia. Dunstan Playhouse. 28 Jan 2022
American Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a hit from the get-go. Albee made his name with a confronting play of prejudice – The Zoo Story – in 1959, and Woolf was his first full-length play. It opened on Broadway in 1962, winning the best play gong in both the Tony awards and from the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. Woolf wowed them again as Mike Nichols’ 1966 movie starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, George Segal and Sandy Dennis; unbelievably, Nichols’ directorial debut. The film was nominated for 13 Oscars and won five. In other words, a must-see play/film.
Must you see this production? Not so sure. George and Martha, married for 23 years, arrive home tipsy after a soiree at Daddy’s, Martha’s father, who is head of the Ivy League university where George teaches history. As Martha announces, that should be an advantage for George, but it is the cynical George who is now history. A younger academic new to the place, and his wife, are invited from the party for a nightcap. They are the perfect audience for George and Martha’s psychologically dangerous and bitchy games where marriage is theatre. And when they tire of driving each other to despair, the guests are fair game. The action is fueled by hard liquor and shrinking inhibitions.
Words and rhythms and subtext are paramount in conveying Albee’s powerful word play of snakes and ladders, but director Margaret Harvey has introduced so many additional theatrical elements that the medium becomes the message. Albee discourages any forelock-tugging one might have done in reverence of the dominant white culture of academia by opening up its underbelly, but Harvey actually defocusses the target with what she calls “colour-conscious casting.” While casting in film is still largely true to description, this has been given up long ago in theatre. I have seen a dozen productions of Ibsen without a single Norwegian, so what does it matter if the actors are whatever ethnicity? When someone is described as older, and they look younger, or narrow-hipped and they’re not, or 185 pounds and they’re obviously less, well, so be it. And colour-conscious is not the same as “colour blind.” Television star Jimi Bani as George plays a George who is obviously of Aboriginal heritage (the dance in the water was a clear signal), as much as African Rashidi Edward playing the younger Nick is African. They aren’t black men playing white men, they are playing black men true to themselves. That’s good and different, but it seems like difference for difference’s sake and why is it about race?
Set designer Ailsa Paterson eschewed the older house described in the play and presents a modern idiom. The performers are within a Perspex box, sort of like an aquarium, except the water is on the outside - say a terrarium for the evening’s blood sport. The poor acoustics and random reflections were annoying. Thankfully, these transparent walls were flown away long before the end of the play. The repeated writing of the play’s title on a never-ending and dominating blackboard was distracting. The moat was a more interesting invention and sometimes useful. The sexually charged scenes were hot! And not normally on display, so that was good.
Director Margaret Harvey puts up with, or directs, a lot of shouting which unfortunately suppresses the required nuance, and the battle between Martha and George seemed more like checkers than chess. There were some wonderful positions (legs up post-near-coitus dysphoria) and juxtapositions, and inventive imagining conveying the more conventional stage directions (eg – doors, doorbell, bathroom, bedroom). Sound designer/composer Andrew Howard’s subtle drumbeat synchronised one’s heart with the dramatic tension.
Margaret Harvey in her notes describes her reasons for factoring in multiple reflections on race, but the production doesn’t comment on race simply by saying it does. It still should be about George and Martha.
David Grybowski
When: 27 Jan to 6 Feb
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au