Adelaide Festival. 29 King William Street, Adelaide. 7 Mar 2019
The shop premise at 29 King William Street has the squeaky clean, white-gleaming clinical look of a High Street cosmetics retail outlet or maybe a surgery. The host turns your gaze to a bag of human fat and then to a display of package soap labeled, Self Human Soap. “Would you like to try the soap?” Handy is a sink and said host helps you lather up and experience the feel of soap made with the by-product of liposuction. Your questioning reveals there were only 2000 bars of soap manufactured in 2016 – each made by hand and individually numbered. I have No. 0875 occupying my desk as I write.
Schuld is German for an amalgam of guilt and debt. Let’s just say you owe something and you’re feeling guilty about it. But it’s a soap business and fabrik means factory. By now you are flabbergasted and intrigued, or if you are thinking of Auschwitz, maybe you should go home, or stay to learn that it’s only a show in an arts festival in 2019, and maybe German-born Dutch creator Julian Hetzel is on to something radically new. Your small party is escorted out of the shop and onto King William Street, around the corner, and into the bowels of the building. Thus begins an incredible education into the particulars of human soap and Hetzel’s virtuous circle to fund the sinking of water bores in a Congo village.
You should experience what happens next without the forearming of my précis. After a disorienting hour in the building, our little group ejaculated through a final door and spilled onto the alleyway. We looked at each other with wonder and couldn’t stop talking about it.
P.S. One can’t wait for the sequel – a vitamin drink made from human blood. Just kidding.
David Grybowski
When: 1 to 17 March
Where: 29 King William Street, Adelaide
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Odeon Theatre. 7 Mar 2019
The Two Jews are actually sitting in the theatre, watching with studied indifference as a full house Adelaide Festival audience files its way in from the jam of an epic foyer queue. Their performance premise is that they are waiting in the foyer for a show and that they are rather early. They also posit that they are their own fathers, that their autobiographical references are really about their sons who bear their names. Just to be tricksy and keep the audience on its toes, one assumes.
In front of them on the stage is posted the biggest cheat sheet in history; running order and cue reminders writ large on huge white cards.
Brian Lipson, experimental theatre legend, and Gideon Obarzanek, choreographer extraordinaire, are semi-retired from public life. Lipson lives in London and Obarzanek in Melbourne. They get together to perform tales from their lives as a festivals party turn. It’s a charming concept and quite irresistible to audiences. Hence sell-out houses.
The two Jews have crafted the show so it looks as if it is really not a lot of bother. They have long silences, tell funny stories, snipe at each other, via the references to their sons, have more pseudo-awkward silences, and have something of an all-out row over the State of Israel whence came Obarzanek. This is as refreshing and enlightening as it is quite shocking. It really pins one’s ears back. But it is a reflection of the intelligence and courage of these two high achieving men, unafraid to balance a program about life in showbiz with some fierce rubbing of a raw old nerve. One tips one’s yarmulka, so to speak.
Lucy Guerin must be in there somewhere, directing those meaningful pauses, just as she has choreographed their finale, a singularly esoteric dance piece performed to an uncomfortably loud electronic droning sound. While the movements are interesting and aesthetic, that noise is profoundly puzzling.
Thus is this a particularly offbeat Festival offering from a couple of arts pinups who happen to be Jewish. Vunderlekh!
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 10 Mar
Where: Odeon Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Anya Anastasia. 7 March
A star falls. Sort of. Well, a little bit maybe, involving a lot of riotousness, outrageousness and thundering hilarity.
Anya Anastasia: The Show is storied Adelaide cabaret star Anya Anastasia’s farewell to cabaret. This show is just her being herself in a wild style show, which might bring to mind for some Tim Curry’s husky, sad lyric feels as Frankenfurter, “whatever happened to Fay Wray?”
Well Anya kinda went off the deep end in a battle with cabaret versus burlesque, demands of the biz and the twists and turns off life.
There’s hope of sorts. Her electric piano is adorned with gold lettering, ‘cabaret star for hire’ and the ever faithful ukulele brings her back to career beginnings in the sweetest way for long term fans.
Anastasia attacks what she’s leaving and what she’s lived with the most intensely concentrated delivery of a decades long, well-honed comic schtick, downright lyric emotional honesty, and physical comedy. There’s sadness and deep vulnerability hidden behind this blindingly brilliant comitragic performance.
Deep down, there’s a bitter-sweetness to this thrilling hour that makes you understand the universal feeling ‘what do I have to do to get a break around here?’
David O’Brien
5 Stars
When: 1 to 16 Mar
Where: Gluttony, The Masonic Lodge, Phoenix Room
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Masonic - Foyer at Gluttony. 5 Mar 2019
Pitchfork is a multisensory experience. It’s about music and food.
It’s a concert like no other. It’s a complete tease. It teases you with excerpts (usually complete movements) from major works from the string quartet repertoire – some well-known, others not so. You want to hear more but there’s no time – it’s onto the next piece.
The food is sophisticated. The flavours and textures are gracious, but there is enough only for a taste. It’s also a tease. Like the music it draws you in. You know it’s good, and your body is inwardly screaming at you that it’s good, but then it’s gone all too quickly.
It doesn’t sound like fun, but it is. The magic is in the paring of the music with the food, the food with the music. The ying with the yang.
The audience is taken to their individual tables by a hostess and Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 3 ‘Mishima’, is playing in the background. Immediately, because of the choice of this particular piece of music, one senses the next sixty minutes are going to be sublime. Glass’s music is not for everyone, but when it accompanies ritual washing of hands with lemon scented hand-wash, it’s just perfect. It’s hypnotic and soothing, like the citrus perfumes.
Scarlatti was played to accompany orange blossom and butterfly pea-flowered iced tea. It borders on a geisha tea ceremony. It’s very Silk Road.
Then it’s ripe camembert cheese with balsamic glaze (applied with a paintbrush of course) while Ravel is gently played. It whisks one off to Montmartre, but just for a short while.
Melon balls dipped in tangy sherbet perfectly suit the effervescence of a Mendelssohn quartet, and Joe Chindamo’s quartet is ideally suited to a game of pass the parcel where every player wins a prize; a piece of fudge in many flavours of course.
David Paterson’s Quartettsätze is given a première performance and it is the highlight of the evening. Paterson is a pianist who specializes in chamber music and his quartet – well, at least the first movement - is stunning. It voices the cello and violins in an especially interesting way which gives an urgency to the melody line. More! We want more! Oh yes, and we are served emu bush tea and native lemon myrtle lamington bites, and we want more of these too. More! Delicious!
With the palate cleansed and taste buds excited it’s onto a slab of chilli chocolate with a spiky Shostakovich quartet urging us to smash the chocolate into bite sizes. How convenient that our hostess has supplied us with a mallet to do the job, and the four players of the Australian String Quartet do not so much as miss a beat or flinch a muscle as we lay into the job!
And to finish? What better than a serene Schubert quartet while we enjoy a deconstructed pav which is semi-chaotically drizzled and crumbled over a fresh plastic tablecloth ready for our eager fingers to scoop it up into our mouths. Such fun!
The ASQ is innovative. This event is proof conclusive.
The caterers, Post Dining, are also innovative. Their merging of food and the arts is inspiring.
The next time an event like this comes along, do NOT hesitate. There’s nothing quite like it.
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Masonic – Foyer at Gluttony
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Fringe. Martha Lott. Holden Street Theatres. 6 Mar 2019
Hot tip. This is going to be one of the must-see shows of Fringe 2019.
It has lured back to the stage Martha Lott. She is Holden Street’s entrepreneur and curator of five-star Fringe show programs. But the stage is where she really belongs.
Of course, she could not have taken on a more difficult piece of theatre.
Grounded is an award-winning work by American playwright, George Brant. It depicts a dedicated F-16 fighter pilot forced down to earth mid- career when she becomes pregnant. She’s a tough nut and life “in the blue” is her steely passion so she is aghast to find that returning to work means that she is grounded, committed to the “chairforce” whence she must become a drone pilot. She finds love as a family woman in her new circumstances but killing the enemy from a skyless trailer on the other side of the world is a very different kettle of fish. The denouement of this gripping one-hander is absolutely riveting, evoking emotion from even the most jaded among us. And it’s a tour de force by Martha Lott.
The actress taps profound resources in reaching for the depths of expression summoned in this potent play. It is way out of the ordinary and has audience members spontaneously springing to their feet in acclaim.
It is a five star play with a ten star performance.
Samela Harris
5 Stars
When: 6 to 16 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au