Adelaide Festival. Somewhere fleetingly. At different times. 5 Mar 2021
Of all strange places for an intimate classical music encounter - Adelaide Oval?
Other people’s reports of 1:1 Concerts have indicated leafy, romantic locations. I was expecting some place verdant.
I suppose, with the sprinklers arcing over the preened green of the playing field, one could call that finely tended Adelaide Oval lawn as verdant. In its way. But it is not what one had envisioned.
To attend these one-on-one Festival concerts, one is met and guided to the secret location of the day. They change, as do the musicians. No one will have quite the same experience. It is one audience member and one musician. One at a time. I am not a music critic but this piece of programming promised something irresistibly “else”. I felt privileged to get a ticket.
So, my guide is an Adelaide Oval volunteer called Trevor, a charming retired headmaster of the Roseworthy school. Along the cool eaves of the eastern side of the oval, he leads me. We talk of how cricketers speak of the Cathedral End of the oval even though the Cathedral is no longer visible, while footballers call it the "northern end". As a pioneer female footy columnist, I remark that it was ever the scoreboard end. And Trevor tells me that the grand old scoreboard, still in use, has been there since 1911.
And, suddenly, there we are, under that famous old Federation scoreboard.
I am introduced to Hannah from the Festival who runs me through the 1:1 ground rules. Phone off. This is a non-verbal encounter. You will not speak to the musician. The musician will not speak to you. No clapping, either.
And now we will go up some stairs.
Hannah leads me up some slightly alarming metal stairs out the back of the scoreboard. And then up some more vertiginous stairs. Suddenly, we are inside the scoreboard. It is a most interesting enclosed space into which daylight streams cautiously through cracks and a narrow slit of a window looking out onto the bright expanse of oval.
What a mysteriously handsome old room it is with its knotty old floorboards silken with wear over its century of use.
Huge coloured plates bearing numbers are on the walls and on the floor.
A young man sits with a cello in a squared space among the numbers.
Hannah indicates my seat opposite him and withdraws.
He gazes at me and locks eyes. He is not, not smiling. His expression is placid, inscrutable. I let go of my big “hello” smile. Try to find a reciprocal expression. I wonder how he is feeling about this? The idea is that he, in locking eyes with me, will somehow sense the sort of music which suits this stranger. I wonder what he sees in me. Could he discern that I adore the cello? I grew up on Pablo Casals. I love deep, mellow musical tones and retreat from shrill or strident tones of voice and instrument. I also adore Baroque music and despise atonal modern composition. As my uncle used to say, “she loves a baroque bun and a cup of rococo”. These are my meditations as we sit there eye-to-eye.
His face is beautiful, sensitive and intelligent. It reminds me of the young Philip Lehmann from the Barossa.
We seem to be sitting there in silence for an aeon.
Then, he raises his bow and begins to play, oh such lovely low notes. And I can study the strings, vibrations, fingering and, oh yes, his musical intensity and expertise. This anonymous cellist is highly skilled. And, as he thrills me with some lovely baroque snippets, he starts to improvise and show me what the instrument can do, what less conventional sounds it can make, indeed, how shrill it can be if one teases it thus. As he plays with the high notes, I find that I have slipped involuntarily into a defensive posture. He does not seem to notice. He is engrossed with his instrument. And he coaxes even more exotic sounds from it before moving into some modern score which seems familiar but I can’t identify. Finally, another bit of virtuoso strings-manship after which he puts down his bow and looks into my eyes again. Just a nod. That’s it. Performance over.
I put my hands together in a motion of thanks and rise to find Hannah right behind me ready to lead me back into the daylight.
I am asked to fill in a form giving my impressions of the experience. My brain is a shambles of unready.
Hanna delivers to me a note from the cellist. His name is David Moran. My program was Bach, improvisation, Britten, improvisation. Ah. I’ve never liked Britten.
But I did so very much like David Moran and that weird and wonderful place.
So, what did I think?
This 1:1 encounter has been altogether other-worldly. It has been a joy of extraordinary incongruity. My senses are soaked and unsettled by the voyage of musical history; from traditional classical to contemporary. It is a bit like the scoreboard itself, more than a century of changing styles.
I wished I could have taken a photograph. What a sight it was, the cellist in the belly of the scoreboard among yesterday’s excitement of its boards of numbers.
But I realise that the image is indelibly committed to mind’s eye. So rare, unimaginable, and utterly unrepeatable. Mine alone. I tuck it away to treasure for ever.
And I bless the Festival for this extraordinary gift.
Samela Harris
When: At Different Times
Where: Somewhere fleetingly
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Vakhtangov State Academic Theatre of Russia. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 5 Mar 2021
You’ve got to be quick with the Festival’s live streams of theatre – Medea and Eugene Onegin - because they’re on for only one night. This Australian exclusive event was sold out to boot, and that’s even when seating doubled due to easing of the Covid restrictions. A lively chat between our Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy and their counterparts from the Vakhtangov Company made one realise the whole concept is awesome. However, horrible delays and echoes due to technology plagued the conversation, but we were assured this would not happen during the performance itself. And it didn’t. The live transmission was flawless, and the gigantic, proscenium-filling image was of amazingly high resolution. This is the next best thing to being there and it is priced accordingly. There are two great benefits to this streamed theatre event: the showing is edited on the fly providing great close-ups, and zero carbon footprint. Before performance, the cameras were pointed on the audience, which looked remarkably like one of ours, and I’m so glad Russian theatre life wasn’t bombed into the Stone Age as a consequence of the Cold War. Their audience was sparse; there is an epidemic after all, but more pertinently, it was 11:30 am in Moscow.
Alexander Pushkin dates from the early 19th Century. His Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse and considered a classic of Russian literature. Chekhov comes later and it’s clear now to see Pushkin influences in his plays. Traditional analysis labels the eponymous character as the protagonist but Lithuanian Rimas Tuminas (idea, script and staging) firmly focuses on the unrequited love of Tatyana and makes Onegin her antagonist.
Black – imparting gravity and seriousness - is the colour of this production. Black dominates the set, the men’s formal apparel and the distorting imperfect mirror upstage, and bleeds into the overall moodiness led by the characterisation of Onegin. The simple virginal white gowns of our heroine, her cheery sister, Olga, and of the playful chorus of womenfolk, is in thematic contrast to the menfolk. Yet the play is not without humour or whimsy. Tuminas sprinkles the theatre magic with characters that can suddenly leap a metre into the air or break into song or dance or play an instrument. Objects are animated, furniture is hefted around and a swirling snowstorm and surreal playground swings are enrapturing. Symbolism abounds in such creations as a mandolin-strumming pixie, a spell-bounding bunny, and a gruff, hard drinking, aging Hussar as a narrator. Tuminas creates scenes of enchantment beside sweeping grandeur next to intimate feelings. The breakdown of Tatyana from her multiple rejections by Onegin wonderfully ranges from a teenager’s pillow bashing to tearful dissolve followed by a return to dignity. Bravo! Another brilliant device of Tuminas is that the poem is set in flashback and we have younger historical versions side-by-side with the “present-day” major male characters. The swagger of the young Onegin who rejects Tatyana for a life of frivolity is contrasted with the older Onegin. The tableau of the broken Onegin, finally himself rejected by Tatyana, coiled in his parlour chair and ruminating on a future of loneliness, is indelible. Eugene Onegin is a morality tale and a tragedy in bringing about one’s own downfall, yet in this production, it is also a buoyant story of a young woman reclaiming her value, recovering her dignity and maturing into a person of integrity.
The Muscovites gave the troupe a standing ovation, yet we didn’t in Adelaide. I’m sure we would have if they were in Her Maj. Vakhtangov, wish you were here! Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 5 Mar
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed
★★★ ½ Adelaide Fringe Festival. Clayton Wesley Uniting Church, Beulah Park. 5 Mar 2021
Presented by local production company Mopoke Theatre Productions, Songs of Travel and Bush Poetry is a staged performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams' song cycle Songs of Travel interspersed with classic Australian bush poetry. It is perfromed by Nicholas Cannon in association with collaborative pianist Andrew Georg.
Written about one hundred and twenty years ago, the cycle can be thought of as Vaughan Williams response to Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin (Fair maid of the Mill) and Winterreise (Winter Journey) and Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer). The Schubert and Mahler cycles are better known and more often performed than the Vaughan Williams, which is unfortunate because Songs of Travel is a totally delightful collection of songs, with some significant recordings available such as by Sir Bryn Terfel.
Nicholas Cannon has an engaging performance style with a warm baritone voice that is balanced across his range. His performance tonight of the last two songs were especially pleasing, with well-pitched leaps and fine dynamics. His gentle and well controlled vibrato adds warmth to his interpretations.
Cannon intersperses the songs with classic Australian bush poetry mostly by Banjo Paterson. This gives an extended narrative to the performance, and although the connections between the songs and the poetry are tenuous at times, it neither matters nor diminishes one’s enjoyment. Cannon’s operatic skills serve him well: he acts out the storylines of the songs and poems with flourish and style, and his delivery of The Geebung Polo Club leaves the audience laughing and wanting more.
There is an attempt to recreate a bushland setting on stage, with empathetic lighting, but it isn’t entirely effective. In fact, Cannon’s costume, singing and acting is more than sufficient.
Kym Clayton
When: 5 to 7 Mar
Where: Clayton Wesley Uniting Church, Beulah Park
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Streamed live from International Theatre Amsterdam to Her Majesty’s Theatre also Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre, Mount Gambier. 4 Mar 2021
It is the great covid-era experiment: transforming live presence onstage into live virtual presence onstage with two-way international video streaming.
The Festival’s cross-global presentation of Simon Stone’s Medea begins late following some audio transmission noises explained by Festival co-director Neil Armfield as synchronisation tests from the Netherlands. Then, upon the huge screen covering the Her Maj stage, there are some positive words from Wouter van Ransbeek, the creative director of International Theatre Amsterdam who gives thanks to Australia for providing the world with the genius theatre-maker Simon Stone, creator of this reworking of the Euripides classic. The camera pans the empty seats of the theatre in which the production is being performed and we see the cast waiting on a big bare stage. “Where is the audience,” asks Armfield. Oh, yes. Amsterdam is still in lockdown, unlike here in Adelaide where a huge audience sits masked and expectant.
And so begins the performance you have when you can’t have a performance.
It is set, actors almost stranded, upon a vast expanse of white stage surrounded by white scrim and occasionally enhanced by a big screen descending upon the big screen. While the figures of the actors are far away in this Bob Cousins design, the video work brings their faces into huge and intense close-ups and one realises that this is an almost impertinently new-age techno take on an ancient Greek tragedy. It was first performed in 431BC.
Stone has re-envisioned the story of a mother’s cruel revenge, basing it upon a twentieth-century counterpart, the case of American doctor Debora Green, who killed her unfaithful medico husband along with their two hapless children in 1951.
Here we have Anna, the successful medical researcher who is betrayed not only by her perfidious husband but also by the man for whom they both work. He has elevated the husband, Lucas, whose affair is actually with his daughter, Clara. Anna has been released from hospital following an earlier breakdown in which she tried to poison Lucas. Now they are reunited and she tries desperately to recover lost ground, to entreat and seduce him back. Their children, making a documentary, it seems, film their intimacy. Clara finds out and reclaims Lucas. And the world starts to crumble symbolically, in shards of black paper “ash” streaming steadily down onto the stage until they resemble a pile of charred autumn leaves. And the white stage also becomes besmirched with Anna’s blood as her flailing desperation escalates. The black “ash” becomes a thing of play and a thing of morbidity and it spreads over the characters and the stage like grotesque black dandruff.
And one realises that in this ghastly tale, there is little room for sympathy towards anyone except the riven children. Lucas has carved a career taking credit for Anna’s achievements and Anna, ostracised and held in contempt, is drowning in a sea of spiteful despair that not even mother love can salve. We all know the ending.
The performances are superb. Ever has this company wowed us with its skills. And here they are amplified with massive close-ups, almost to the pores of their skin. There is no place to fudge a performance. It is live, immediate, and pure. Marieke Heebink, in jeans and stilettos, gives an award-worthy portrayal of poor, despairing Anna with Aus Greidanus jr. every bit exemplifying the weak, self-interested, and false-hearted husband. Eva Heijnen is very persuasive as the opportunistic Clara who has stolen Anna's world and Bart Slegers stands strong as her father Christopher. The cast is ably completed by Alexander Elmecky, Joy Delima, Titus Theunissen, and Sonny van Utteren beneath an eerie and ominous soundscape from Stefan Gregory.
The downside is in the subtitling which, at the bottom of the screen against a white stage with smatterings of black, requires intense concentration. Lines spoken in Dutch cascade from the actors and it is hard to keep up. Occasionally, laughter from the stalls make one wonder, in the dress circle, what one might have missed.
In this revivification of Euripidean tragedy, Simon Stone certainly has pierced straight to the old core of universality. Treachery, betrayal, and the gaslighting of women remain ubiquitous. Rarely do they end quite so lethally, but the law courts are full of cases and the world remains full of those who live with the scars. Then is now. Only the telling and the technology has changed.
Samela Harris
When: 4 Mar
Where: Streamed live from International Theatre Amsterdam to Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed
★★★ ½
Adelaide Fringe Festival. Scantily Glad Theatre. Black Box Theatre, Botanic Gardens. 3 Mar 2021
David Attenborough(esque) voiceover? This must be serious. And anthropological.
As it turns out, Something in the Water is neither, while almost subliminally being both.
SE Grummett (Grumms) is a Canadian trans artist who takes us on their journey of discovery; through what is ‘normal’ and not normal as identified by the audience.
Using the ubiquitous Ken and Barbie Dolls, paper, a fish tank and overhead projector, Grumms introduces us to gender observed their way. Barbie shaves her legs, but she is fully making independent choices! Ken is very masculine, sporting his sixpack and ensuring that ‘feelings’ are butted away asap. These two (who meet on Tinder – normal!) and their relationship are set up beautifully by Grimms, who sets about to simply but humorously set up then break down the binary gendered ‘norm’.
Grumms announces them self to be a girl at the beginning of the show, but we are soon made aware, as they explore the gender rigidity of Barbie and Ken (normal!), that the binary ‘normal’ is just not working for them. Enter Squiddie. Squiddie dances beautifully in the water to surf music and in a night of strange dreams and alchemy, Suiddie and Grumms become one, or are they two? Has Grumms become Squiddie or has Squiddie become Grumms? Or are they two in the same body?
Grumms pulls out a number of devices including horror/monster films to illustrate her story; the squid is but one of them. The audience, seated at appropriately spaced cabaret style tables, become villagers, supplied with metal pitchforks (no plastic for SA!) and are encouraged to consider, who is the monster? Is there actually a monster?
The overhead projection device works brilliantly to create both set and story, and adds to the childlike simplicity with which this narrative is told. That it is presented at such a level is the secret to its success. There is much laughter throughout this production. Grumms pokes gentle fun at societal norms and exposes some of the absurdities that really are as risible as they claim.
An intelligently comedic production, Grumms has managed to take their own experience of identifying their non-binary self, and explained that journey in a way that in the end makes it seem, well, ‘normal’.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 3 to 21 Mar
Where: Black Box Theatre, Botanic Gardens
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au