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
★★
Adelaide Fringe Festival. The Piglet (open-air) at Gluttony - Rymill Park. 3 Mar 2021
Jon Bennet styles himself as a story-teller, not a stand-up comedian. His show Playing with Men is receiving it’s SA première at this year’s Fringe and is a gentle look at his adolescence and growth to early adulthood, all through the lens of his involvement in Aussie rules footy.
On a very chilly evening in the open air venue (or ‘paddock’ as Bennet describes it) we are introduced through anecdotes to his family, his mates and girlfriends, his sporting heroes and enemies, and his pets. The stories are an eclectic mix of the banal and the boorish, with some almost leaving a bad taste in your mouth, vicariously speaking! There are a few laughs – not many – but that’s not really the point, because Bennett is actually trying to make a number of serious points about masculinity, empathy, and living a good life, even though he apologises for doing so again and again and again throughout the performance.
The show doesn’t really know what it wants to be yet. It’s billed as comedy/theatre, but it’s neither one nor the other, and the incessant apologising reinforces this view. The script needs tightening to make it really work, and the whole thing would be much better in a more intimate and cosy venue, like a room in a pub or a footy club.
Kym Clayton
When: 3 to 21 Mar
Where: The Piglet (open-air) at Gluttony - Rymill Park
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au