Adelaide Festival. The Workshop, Adelaide Festival Centre. 29 Feb 2020
This one-off performance was a real hoot. A large screen is set up in the workshop deep in the bowels of the Festival Centre. The audience is surrounded by jungle motifs including faux life-sized stuffed jungle animals. Geoff Cobham’s lighting above signifies colourful contrails from soaring birds. And below the screen is the Shaolin Afronauts – Adelaide’s own 10-piece afrobeat/soul/funk/avant garde jazz band. They completely enhance the Mad Max movie experience.
George Miller’s 1979 dystopia pic still packs a punch and the young NIDA graduate Mel Gibson is very lithe and handsome. The first four-fifths of the film is a horror job movie; you are terrified the feral motorbike gang will wreak violent havoc at any time. The remainder is a vengeance film, where Mad Max takes revenge for the murder of his son and the near-fatal injuries to his wife. Never mind now that Max’s final retribution torture is inflicted on a man who pleads mental illness and was shown not to be guilty of torching Max’s cop partner (it was an accident!). You don’t have to be a psych nurse to figure that all the characters – cops or crooks – are struggling with their inner demons.
The Afronauts got everyone’s attention by bellowing out the suspense during the opening car chase when Max mows down his first bad guy in the film. Where the Afronauts’s nuanced notes were overwhelming, the subtitles kept you filled in, but there were a few short bits where the original soundtrack/dialogue sufficed and the Afronauts took a deserved breather. When their brass revved up and the guitar wailed with the Bronze’s sirens, the Mad Max mayhem was overwhelming. Bravo!
P.S. Sorry, show over. One night only
David Grybowski
When: 29 Feb
Where: The Workshop, Adelaide Festival Centre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Main Theatre, AC Arts. 29 Feb 2020
Samira Elagoz was born in Helsinki in 1989 and identifies as a Finnish/Egyptian film maker. Since 2014, she had been making award-winning visual art, including her first feature film, Craigslist Allstars, and this narrated documentary, Cock Cock…Who’s There? from 2016. Cock Cock… was winner of the Prix Jardin d’Europe at Vienna’s ImPulsTanz in 2017, and also took the Total Theatre Award at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe.
Elagoz was raped six years ago and after a year of recovering – on her self-described “rape anniversary” - she commenced a project of filmed conversations of her family’s and friends’ response to the rape. This turned out to be the most benign segment of the documentation. She ratchetted up her research to document her first encounter with men harvested from advertising websites catering to adult services, and later, to document her first kiss with such the same. It’s not as cut and dry as that – there is a film of a man sucking his own cock and some footage of Elagoz’s button-like nipples. She informs that these filmed encounters take place under conditions made safe, yet completely intimate.
Part-way through her “research,” she meets American photographer Richard Kern in New York, soon after her second rape in Tokyo, and reveals that he bragged to her how he has sex with every one of his models. With a hint of jealousy, Elagoz laments how unfair that was; that he can safely have sex with any one, any time he wants, while with her, any sexual encounter can rapidly spiral out of control. I could not possibly know Elagoz’s mind, but it appears as if she thought: How can I interpret my rape through a project where I can safely meet and possibly have sex with as many strangers as I want, record the evidence while saying I’m presenting the female gaze, and then make a narcissistically super-indulgent documentary – a kind of never-ending selfie – showing what a desirable cock-teaser I am, like I’ve been doing since I was 10. And then convince award committees and festival directors that it’s cutting edge and not angst-ridden self-promoting propaganda.
In Elagoz’s show, I was reminded of Eckhart Tolle’s concept of the pain body - how the pain body likes to spread its pain. Elagoz is a great case of the victim becoming the perpetrator and perpetuating that pain. I felt used and maybe that’s her point.
No, that wasn’t a standing ovation at the end of the show. That was people lining up in the aisles still trying to walk out during the closing images of frontal close-ups of Samira Elagoz’s face while she’s dribbling cum out of her lascivious lips. And in case you averted your gaze the first time, the moving image of about 15 seconds is repeated about half a dozen times – each one different. But you don’t need to see the show for this pleasure – go to her website: samiraelagoz.com/cock-cock-whos-there.
Fascinating like a train wreck.
David Grybowski
When: 28 Feb to 3 Mar
Where: Main Theatre, AC Arts
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Ukiyo, Gluttony. 1 Mar 2020
Two guys, the brothers Angus and Matilda, comprise the Circus Firemen, whose show is aimed squarely at the children and family market… this Sunday morning session was a willingly raucous full house. We’d been promising the kids we’d see this show for a couple of Fringes now, and they didn’t disappoint.
Four and six year olds hoot with laughter at some of the more obvious slapstick (‘my ladder is the wrong way around’) but there were long spaces which cried out for more. Even in a short one hour show, young kids in particular quickly lose interest, and the longwinded recruitment of audience member Reuben was merely filler, I’m afraid. Too much talk, too many thoughts iterated then reiterated, then restated: “I hope you survive the trick, Reuben.” One would have expected these guys to be able to read an audience better by now.
But the firemen turn in some great tricks, the ubiquitous juggling – up to seven clubs (skittles) in the air at one time, some exceptional balance and ladder tricks, and some tricks aimed directly at the adults in the venue. The kids who helped in the reviewing process agreed (unsurprisingly!) that the juggling with chainsaw and two sharp knives was the highlight of the show.
And it was. My only real complaint – as expressed above – was that there were too many slow spots in such a short performance.
Alex Wheaton
When: 1 to 15 March
Where: Ukiyo, Gluttony, Rymill Park
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★1/2
Mark Salvestro & BCauseARTS. Bakehouse Theatre. 29 Feb 2020.
Written and performed by Mark Salvestro, The Will To Be is a touching story of self-discovery. It is about a university English literature lecturer named William O’Halloran who has lost his job because he is having an affair with a student whom he is assisting to prepare for a role in a student production of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. In 1962 – as now – an affair between a teacher and a student is a ‘no-no’. But it’s worse than that. The student is male, and in the 1960s homosexual activity is a criminal office punishable by imprisonment. William is spared that. He is simply ‘let go’ from his university post, which, according to his termination letter, is “an act of mercy” in deference to the esteem in which he is otherwise held.
Roll the clock forward to right now and Sydney’s Mardi Gras is celebrating gay pride for the whole world to see. Despite such public celebrations, members of the LGBTIQ community still confront prejudice and difficulties sometimes unwittingly aided and abetted by government actions. Pride is about knowing one’s self worth. It’s about confronting one’s vulnerabilities and having the courage to be one’s true self despite the obstacles.
This is exactly what William O’Halloran ultimately does, but even now, as then, it takes enormous courage.
In a fifty minute long spell-binding solo performance, Mark Salvestro is William O’Halloran.
The story telling and acting is exquisite. We feel his nervousness, his pain, and his excitement. Having just been dismissed, William is packing up his office and he speaks directly to the audience and invites us ‘in’ to his world. He explains how the affair started, his initial resistance, and the subsequent moments of self-discovery. There are flashbacks to his own student days and to when he first met his wife, to him ‘coming out’ to his wife, and to him making love with Henry, the student he is coaching. We are never in doubt as to what time period we are in – the text does that beautifully – and there are attempts to make it clearer through lighting changes, but they are unnecessary. Salvestro makes it crystal clear where we are: a slight shift of his body, the set of his head, a perfectly-timed and executed change of gesture.
William is a repressed man, and he is anxious. He doesn’t really know himself and Salvestro exquisitely portrays William’s hesitancy and nervousness. Words cannot really do justice to his stagecraft. One almost aches – sharing William’s pain – while watching Salvestro’s performance
Highly recommended.
Kym Clayton
When: 24 Feb to 7 Mar
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Almeida Theatre. Dunstan Playhouse. 29 Feb 2020
Applause does not come instantly as The Doctor’s cast line up for the curtain. The audience is suspended, still in the grip of the play. And then it leaps to ovation. What a tour de force by an actress! What a mighty beast of an unsettling play.
The Doctor is an English work that has been “very freely adapted” by its director Robert Icke from Professor Bernhardi, a 1912 play by Viennese doctor/writer Arthur Schnitzler. Then and now, it is a play about medical and religious ethics. And, in its modern incarnation, it is a searing indictment of a society overrun with political and moral agendas, a world of endless self-righteousness and inflexible beliefs. At the end of the day, the play’s primary message boils down to a single word: “compromise”.
It is staged with eloquent austerity, with a vast curved wall and, centre stage, a lone trestle table and benches which rotate ever so slowly to the accompaniment from aloft of subtle but highly articulate percussion from drummer, Hannah Ledwidge. Centre rear sliding doors open onto the corridor world of a busy hospital, doctors in white coats hurry to and fro and converge around the table in meetings with Professor Ruth Wolff, The Doctor. The issue is the impending death a teenage girl with sepsis brought on by an incomplete home abortion. Wolff obstructs the entry of a Catholic priest summoned by the girl’s parents to give last rites. Wolff is in authority and believes that the priest’s appearance would shatter the girl’s sense of hope and panic her into a fearful death. Wolff is a secular Jew adamantly dedicated to science and her role as a doctor and she has no time for any form of religious claptrap. And so the issue of rights erupts. The medical staff divide on religious grounds and thence on racial grounds. Wolff sticks to her guns. The girl’s grieving father, utterly agonised in the genuine belief that his daughter has ended up in purgatory, swears revenge. A hospital corridor confrontation becomes a media focus. Suddenly, identities slide sideways and characters who were white are now identified as black and male becomes female. And the audience must juggle these unlikely switches along with bioethics and conflicting moral certitudes. A disgraced Wolff must defend herself to a smug panel of self-righteous minority groups: right-to-lifers and religious scholars. There’s quite an enlightening lecture on the “woke” movement from one of them. They want her to compromise her beliefs and her identify while they, of course, will never give sway. Audience members writhe in their seats, containing the urge to speak out as they witness the slaughter of sacred cows.
It is riveting theatre, both in its cerebral content and in its sublime production. It is what festivals are for. Not that we don’t have wonderful theatre here, but this is a major work with a massive cast. It is creme de la creme. As for Juliet Stevenson in the principal role, hers is a performance of the most profound power and commitment. She commands the stage even through the interval, and for two and three quarter hours leaves it only momentarily. There are times when she makes the boundaries of life and theatre blur and one almost believes she is, indeed, Professor Wolff.
And thus does Stevenson and her moveable feast of fellow cast members deliver a breathtaking gift of theatre and a wealth of grist for the wheels of thought.
Samela Harris
When: 29 Feb to 8 Mar
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au