★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Makan Wine Bar. 12 Mar 2025
Mark Isaac is gay, autistic, a medical doctor, Scottish, and doesn’t mind poking fun at himself and his neurodivergence (although he says he hates that term, because what’s normal anyway?). It sounds like the ingredients are there for a fun time!
Isaac is one of a growing number of comedians who use their sexuality as a scaffold for their humour, but to throw autism into the mix might seem risky. In Isaac’s case, the risk has not paid off and his show A Kilted Queer does not live up to its publicity and hype.
Isaac has been successful elsewhere, with positive responses at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Sydney Comedy Festival, but this potential is not evident in his current show, which is disjointed, overly reliant on audience participation, and under-prepared.
The small audience in the cute upstairs Makan Wine Bar were generous, kind spirited and laughed loudly on occasions. Some identified with Isaac’s lived experience, and valued his honesty, but at the end of the day, it was meant to be stand-up comedy, but it missed the mark.
Kym Clayton
When: 12 to 15 Mar
Where: Makan Wine Bar
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Rhino Room. 12 Mar 2025
AJ Lamarque is not your ordinary garden-variety comic. He is extraordinarily clever, witty, perceptive, and a gratuitous, smutty word or remark doesn’t get any airplay at all in his show (although he does use the word ‘penis’ once, but that surely doesn’t count!).
His show – A Beginner’s Guide to Gay Cruising – is his first foray into the Adelaide Fringe, but his season is preciously short. He is better known in the eastern states and has a successful eclectic career as a presenter, writer, producer and comedian. Word of mouth is king in comedy, and clearly the word is out as evidenced by the sold-out audience in the intimate Hell’s Kitchen in the Rhino Room.
Lamarque is an out and proud gay man, and early in his routine he lets us know that his show is not about gay men looking to ‘hook up’ in public places but is rather about going on an ocean cruise exclusively for gay men! He speaks from personal experience, but his narrative is less about the salacious activity one might assume happens when you get five-thousand gay men together in one location for nine days of partying, and more about how such an event can be therapeutic for someone who feels they are labelled ‘gay’ first, and anything else second.
It all sound rather serious, and it is, but Lamarque’s abundant skill is such that the audience never stops laughing. And it’s genuine laughter – it’s happy and appreciative laughter. He frequently makes a point that is potent at one level and then turns it into a killer oh-so-funny joke by contrasting it with something totally unexpected.
Along the way he is self-deprecating, but it’s purposeful. He puts himself down in the mildest of ways but uses it as a magnet to bring us back to the point he is making. Sometimes the point is sad, but every grey cloud, etc, etc and we still finish up laughing.
Lamarque’s brand of comedy is sophisticated, as is he. Lamarque is fun. Lamarque is the sort of comedian you want to see again, and again. He is charming, easy on the eye and has a flashing and infectious smile that fills the stage.
Kym Clayton
When: 12 to 15 Mar
Where: Rhino Room
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Buckets Nijinsky Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 11 Mar 2025
The most perplexing show in Fringe 2025 is up and running and now in the crosshairs of the critics.
The Platypus is the work of beloved telly legend and one-time Adelaide boy Francis Greenslade, and the first impression through the opening scenes is a resounding WTF?
This play features two Melbourne actors on the almost re-invented stage of The Arch and they are deep in kitchen-sink drama. Oh, well, we don’t get a lot of that in the theatre these days; John Osborne is nigh forgotten. Hang on. Maybe this is referencing soapies. Interesting choice for a first play.
But a glossy full-colour program warns of lots of scenes and production values. Hmm. Are we going movie style here?
Well, the cat is out of the proverbial. Or should one say, the Platypus is out of the water.
If science recognises it as that wondrous mixed-up beast we call a monotreme - an egg-laying aquatic mammal with a beak - we in the theatre may recognise its namesake as a theatrical melange.
The moment that penny dropped in the preview performance of Platypus, it became recognisable as a wild, wonderful and extremely unlikely theatrical concoction. How daring. How original.
Its primary fault might be that it assumes knowledge from its audience, Greenslade has not targeted cultural ingenues here, this zany piece is for the devotees. If anything, it is too clever by half. There goes half a star.
It would go down like a rock in a tent amid all those acrobats performing in The Garden. Then again, it is acrobatic theatre in a mind garden all of its own.
So why, one wonders, is this Australian character onstage suddenly talking in an American accent? Why is domestica now drama? Is that Iambic pentameter one hears? Oh, she declaims that she hates musicals and is now singing one. Sweet parody. This now feels like Mamet. Um, Congreve? How did Oscar Wilde get into the act?
Platypus swims through currents and layers of theatrical leaf litter, bottom feeding and chomping noble archival crustaceans. What drama diet will be next? Comedy? Oh yes. Then again, maybe less funny than funny peculiar.
It is a tough call on the two actors who have to swing from genre to genre with quick changes here and there. Designer Sarah Tullock has done wonders with The Arch, flanking the stage with two black screens which mimic a proscenium arch. It gives so much more scope and movement to this very busy production.
There’s an appropriate diversity of sound and music via the work of David Franzke and agreeable lighting from a Clare Springett plot.
A wee lad called Western Thomas makes a cameo appearance. He must speak up. Ditto, on occasion, the versatile Rebecca Bower who plays a challenging assortment of women. The accomplished John Leary also spreads the wings of style, giving ferocious light relief when sharing the stage with the character of Freddy.
The more one knows about theatre, the more fun one will have with this undainty off-the-wall confection.
This critic’s favourite laugh-out-loud moment: “Pinter”.
Wait for it.
Francis Greenslade was never meant to be ordinary. Here, finding him adventuring into playwright/director mode, one finds him fearlessly uber-quirky. He could up some of his direction just a tad.
But, bless him.
He bringeth us a rare diversion. He be a bit of a treasure.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 23 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres, The Arch
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
Adelaide Festival. Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch + Terrain Boris Charmatz. Festival Theatre. 11 Mar 2025
Cafe Muller - Pina Bausch
Aatt enen tionon - Boris Charmatz
herses, duo - Boris Charmatz
The dance world tipped on its axis when Pina Bausch came on the scene. Ever since her Kontakthof and 1980 at the 1982 Adelaide Festival, our audiences have craved to see more. Bausch dance is not just dance, it is theatre of extraordinary movement. It delves into the human predicament and our emotional quandaries, interpreting them in the form of highly evocative and original mannerisms. They hit a nerve in the psyche and stay there. So, we Adelaide audiences beamed with pleasure in 1992 to see her work back in town with Palermo Palermo and yet again in 2016 when her Nelken covered the stage in carnations.
Bausch's early smoker’s death in 2009 was taken as a great blow not only to the arts internationally, but the grief reverberated through the Adelaide thousands who had so admired her work during Festival encounters.
Bausch’s impact on this city’s arts aficionados has been the stereotypical of what well-curated Adelaide Festivals do to nourish and sophisticate the arts sensibilities of the city. Since 1960, it has lain the foundation of an educated arts market.
Cafe Muller was first danced in 1978 and since has been deemed Bausch’s most iconic work. In 2025 it is impeccably reiterated with the Festival Theatre stage flanked by perspex screens and arrayed in chairs and tables. Spot-lit at the back is the revolving door which may or may not lead customers into Cafe Muller. The cafe’s principal patron is a sleepwalking woman whose path through the chairs and tables is constantly and fairly chaotically cleared by an anxious gentleman in a suit. A second dreaming woman, similarly clad in a plain slip nightie, echoes some of this woman’s obliviousness.
The scene develops with two more males, one of whom tries repeatedly to arrange the body of the sleepwalker with that of a very passive man who stood in her path. Fail after fail ensues as the woman drops repeatedly from his impassive arms to the floor, finally to seek his embrace in her own way. It is funny. It is frustrating but accompanied by Henry Purcell arias and sounds of bodies in contact with surfaces, it makes sense in the end. It is all about lost souls and the flaws of human connection. Sometimes Cafe Muller conveys a sense of the placid and sometimes high anxiety. A third woman, clad in streetwear, scuttles to and fro tracking and scrutinising the action of the others. She feels like “us”. When, at last, she sheds her coat and shoes, she expresses her confusion and hope in a piece of the beautifully idiosyncratic Bausch form of movement which thrills the soul and, indeed, has made that indelible mark on the international choreographic repertoire ever since. And the Adelaide audience sighs, because this is what it has come for: the essence of Bausch.
Cafe Muller is part of Club Amour which is a triple program. While the audience is seated in the auditorium for Cafe Muller, for the first two pieces it is either standing or sitting on the floor on the stage itself. With the stage enclosed by its curtains, it permits a novel sense of theatrical intimacy.
For this first of choreographer Boris Charmatz’s pieces, three dancers, two males and a female, appear on a tall three-tiered scaffold. They take their pants off and throw their bodies to and fro in their contained spaces, athletic and aesthetic, the soundscape largely that of their bodies hitting the floor in frequent purposeful falls but sometimes the amazing sound of a human voice sustaining an endless breath on one note. This work is a bit worrying, the incessant hard and loud falls the performers are taking feels punishing rather than enlightening.
After a short break herses, duo is performed. Two dancers, completely nude, writhe and intertwine on the floor. Such floor work reminds one of the very earliest experiences of modern dance when prone bodies were a brave new choreographic thing, back when our indomitable Elizabeth Dalman exposed Adelaide to the work of Elio Pomare. Perchance there are few of us still around with such ancient terms of reference. But, believe me, before our Liz and Elio, dancers were mainly on their feet and in conventional sightlines. Nor were they nude.
This present writhing work features two lithe and flawless bodies. One gains little sense of character and perceives mainly a sense of physical versatility. In this context, it is indeed amazingly aesthetic and inventive: beautiful, complex bodywork; a joy of skin on skin; a message on the meaning of human contact, primal and essential. Yet, while it is interesting and symbolic on the ground, ’tis not quite groundbreaking.
Charmatz is the new face of Tanztheater Wuppertal and one is very grateful that he carries that precious legacy.
Adelaide will be enthusiastic to see where next he takes it. Please come back.
Samela Harris
When: 10 to 16 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Forced Entertainment (UK). Australian Premiere. Space Theatre. 9 Mar 2025
‘Tabletop’ Shakespeare? Do follies in the name of The Bard have no end?
Well, no. Four centuries have dimmed not his light, nor our appreciation of his oeuvre.
So, be gone ye glorious schools of classical enunciation, ye men in tights.
Here one hath a tin of curry powder and a sugar shaker amid a cast of thousands from the pantry shelf.
Iambic pentameter thou art too wordy. Thine stories may compact, and still the people will acclaim.
And so they are doing at the Adelaide Festival, thriving on the serious silliness of Tabletop Shakespeare.
Epic plays in 45 minutes with nothing more than a good narrator and a cleverly potted plot.
The pots being quite literal. Sometimes they are herbs. Sometimes sauces.
’Twas a sugar-shaker which starred as generous Timon of Athens and his faithful servant Flavius was played by a boot-shaped glass spirit measure. The poet and the artist were wee pots of baking additives. Lucillus appeared to be curry powder and a tube of wasabi was utterly typecast as the misanthrope, Apermantus. A can of Edgell peas played Lucullus while white plastic cups played senators. There are a lot of characters in Timon of Athens so it took quite a shopping list.
Two pantry shelves, densely stocked with condiments, sauces, and utensils, flank the stage in The Space, the narrator sitting centre alone at a cheap utilitarian table with the chosen “players” to hand on boxes at either side.
It was actor Robin Arthur who voiced the tale of Timon, steadily bringing the grocery characters to and fro, the narrative nicely time-lined with “the next morning” and “later in the garden” to give a good sense of time and place. Arthur was not beyond a little levity here and there and a wee bit of mime. Timon’s time in the dank cave was particularly amusing, albeit, of course, the play is a tragedy.
The UK company is performing the entire works of Shakespeare in its Adelaide Festival season. This critic, however, was ticketed to only two, the second being The Two Gentemen of Verona.
’Twas always a lovely play and albeit suffering somewhat under a fierce air-conditioning flow, Claire Marshall brought it entertainingly to life amid a tabletop of what one might dare to describe as engrossing groceries. Who would have thought an audience could fall in love with a tiny nutmeg grater? Well, it did. The weeny grater embodied Crab, the dog belonging to Launce, servant of Proteus who, in turn, is best friend to the “Gentleman” Valentine. While Crab has no lines, his reactive movements under the hand of Marshall are actually rather endearing.
One should sit near the front to identify precisely all the action figures. Their labels are small. However, the narratives are crystal clear and artfully abridged so one is hearing Shakespeare as stories well told, rather than the scripts of the great master.
Thus, distilled and performed, great plays arrive as simply delicious thespian whimsy.
Just charming.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 16 Mar
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au