Adelaide Fringe. Knaive Theatre. Holden Street Theatres. 6 Mar 2019
The audience files into the theatre to encounter a very English young man onstage very hospitably offering cups of tea to one and all. How nice. Yes, please. No to biscuits, but thanks.
Are we at the right Fringe show? Bin Laden?
The actor, Sam Redway, is a peaches-and-cream English lad out of RADA.
But, having finished passing out mugs of steaming tea, he starts interviewing the audience, asking people how they like their governments and their politicians. He removes his shoes and alerts the audience to his flip chart and his intention to teach it how to succeed and take control in life and, by the way, his name is now Abu.
For the next hour, this handsome, tousle-haired Englishman delivers an impassioned monologue about Islamic hopes and dreams, failures and philosophies, and evolving political affrays. As Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, he wields an automatic weapon and preaches a passion for the rightness of his cause. He summons from the audience, a woman who is to be his wife and a man who is to be Azam, his spiritual and strategic counsel. In this performance, he chances upon the TheAdelaideShow podcaster, Steve Davis, and adorns him in Islamic head attire for the role. Davis is a pro and slips into character with panache.
Redway's’s voice is superb. His focus of performance is impressive. He wields a small suitcase from which costume changes emerge - from suit and tie to white smock. He urges his audience to think about Islamic hopes and values. Bin Laden was young. He was idealistic and driven. He suffered failures. He died young.
Of course, waving a book on the subject and flipping the pages of his success plan, he tends to the didactic. But it is an interesting idea he moots, looking at the terrorist to end them all from within. And, the cup of tea was lovely.
Samela Harris
4 Stars
When: 6 to 17 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Masonic - Phoenix Room at Gluttony. 6 Mar 2019
The Lords of Strut are a double dance and slapstick act like you have never seen before, and probably never want to see again – well at least not for while – they are exhausting!
For fifty minutes, Irish brothers Seamus and Sean-tastic deliver non-stop turbo-charged high-energy antics that have you guffawing, jaw dropping and ear-to-ear smiling with their risqué banter and burlesque and occasionally gender-bending costumes.
Both guys are easy on the eye – the ladies in the audience vouch for that (and possibly a guy or two!) – and they strut their way through a fictional narrative about how their mother has done her best to turn them both away from pursuing careers in dance. The story is so extreme and so grotesque in parts that it has you laughing from start to finish.
Despite their acrobatic dance routines, which are impressive but not so out-of-the-ordinary, the narrative is not sufficiently strong to have the audience eating out of their hands, which is what they work relentlessly and so hard to achieve. There is some audience participation and one willing audience member joins them on stage and meets their ‘mother’ in what might be described as an anatomical exploratory experience. It is quite remarkable that the ‘volunteer’ took to the task so enthusiastically, but that’s the sign of a comic who makes his audience feel comfortable.
Good fun.
Kym Clayton
When: 6 to 16 Mar
Where: Masonic – Phoenix Room at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Histoire(s) du theatre (1). Belgium/Germany. Space Theatre. 5 Mar 2019
Theatre is artifice. So one may have thought before Milo Rau. This extraordinary revolutionary director seeks to portray reality through that very artifice. What he achieves is a heart-stoppingly dramatic experience.
La Reprise is about a murder, the lethal bashing and torture of a young homosexual man called Ihsane Jarfi in Liege, Belgium. It is a true story.
Rau prefaces the production with a wonderful Egyptian-born actor, Sabri Saad El Hamus, talking about the craft of acting and the way that only theatre can give a voice to the dead. Thus from beyond the grave, but through the actors, comes Ihsane's story, not in his own voice but in that of those who were around him: his parents, his lover, his friend. And, the ensuing issue is whether truth and reality are ever quite the same.
Rau marries the reality of live acting with the simultaneous separate reality of video delivery. Both are profoundly immediate for the audience, the close-up video having big screen pores-and-all intimacy.
The actors are introduced in the form of an audition for the play. They do not come as sleek drama school products but as unemployed Liege locals. They speak in French or Flemish with surtitles beneath the video. Their interviews reveal their backgrounds. It is artfully static, the actors sitting and playing to camera, the nuances of expressions magnified on the screen. There’s Suzy the 67-year-old retiree who has done a spot of acting. There is multi-racial Tom who is always colour-cast and who can bluff that he also is multi-lingual. This trick is the comic turn of the production as he incorporates local references. There is Fabian, a former factory worker and forklift driver, a man usually cast as a villain "because of my face". There are also Sebastien and Kristen. The roles take them from interviewers to characters as the play unfolds in five chapters, each one titled and introduced formally onscreen. Thus do Suzy and Sabri become parents of the murdered boy, depicted at home in bed or interviewed on TV, naked, stripped to raw emotion. There are interwoven references to the actors’ auditions as reality and artifice play together.
How did the victim end up in the hands of the murderers? The audience finds out, piece by piece until an almost unbearably graphic denouement. The perfection of the theatrical depiction of the cruel joyriders is so intense that in their engrossment, audience members may lose a sense of their own reality; just being swept into the space Rau has created. Masterful is an understatement for this level of theatrical intensity. And, it is not comfortable.
La Reprise means “the repeat” and this is the action of the play, dissecting and re-enacting the world and characters involved in the victim’s life, until he lies naked and brutalised in the rain. This is Rau’s gut-wrenching “banality of death”.
It is an exceptional theatre work which explains the raging international reputation of the Swiss director. It is the first production to express his 10-point “Ghent Manifesto” rules which “aim not to depict the real, but to make the representation itself real”.
La Reprise succeeds in this.
It is a brilliant, gruelling, disturbing work. It is the stuff of which good Festivals are made.
Samela Harris
When: 5 to 7 Mar
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Patrick Livesey and Holden Street Theatres. Holden Street Theatre – The Studio. 5 March 2019
What a great “what if” idea for a play. Fast forward to 2027. The Queen has sadly passed (at the glorious age of 101) and for the six following days, King Charles III has bolt holed himself in the palace. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is fomenting republican rioting in the streets. The new Prince of Wales, William, is too gutless to seize the day according to Prince George, and there is only one royal left to save the kingdom from extinction. His fourteen-year-old self. But don’t worry, he has a three phase plan; he’s thought it all out. So why is he still sulking in his monogrammed silk jammies?
With this ludicrous yet slightly probable premise, writer, performer and producer Patrick Livesey, in his first self-devised one-person show, does a star turn as the mincing wannabe monarch. Blessed with persuasive resemblance to George’s granny, Diana, Livesey further inhabits his George with a pitch perfect accent, lively gay mannerisms, monstrous petulance and a git’s witlessness. All the royal men have failed and he points out his role models in frames on the side table: Elizabeth II, Diana and his mum.
Urgency is created through BBC broadcasts revealing that Britain is in turmoil, but George has a magnificent plan to appeal to the Commons through his current infatuation named Harvey. Livesey has plausibly created the conditions of George’s isolation at this crucial time and thus the audience becomes his only confidant. In spite of being stuck in his bedroom, Livesey’s George is all exuberant action and regal plotting; he so innocently provides a hilarious satire on the complaints of the monarchy: expensive, useless, in a Buckingham bubble. Yet he makes you feel you’ll miss them if they went the way of the dodo.
Livesey has created a whole world in a bedroom of plausible intrigue comingled with real issues and sharp observation, all delivered by his charismatic man-child deluded dilettante. True git! Bravo!
David Grybowski
5 Stars
When: 5 to 17 March
Where: Holden Street Theatres – The Studio
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Un Poyo Rojo/T4 in association with Aurora Nova. AC Arts - Main Theatre. 4 Mar 2019
Two buff men dressed in loose track pants and singlets warm up while the audience files in. In the background are some gym lockers, loads of water bottles, a radio and a bench. They mostly ignore each other but some glances indicate incipient competition. The moves are a quirky combination of the athletic and the aesthetic. The lights dim and rise, the soundtrack amplifies and the games begin.
These Argentinean red roosters circle and joust, show off and preen, compete and compare for one-upmanship. The sweat flies and the dirt on the floor grease their clothes. The Latin dance music sets the beat. Macho moves sometimes unexpectedly abut with homoerotic situations where the men are momentarily surprised by their acceptance, but they quickly revert to a ritual courtship. The entire floor space is alive with their fluency. All body parts have star turns showing off funny feet or happy hands, and in imitations of cocks or bulls. The show stems from a Spanish tradition of comic opera in a vernacular style of common humour. Luciano Rosso is a YouTube star and a favourite son of Argentina. His hilarious eye-popping facial work makes one grimace in sympathy.
About half way through there is a smoko break like no other you have seen. Alfonso Barón, a former elite sportsman turned actor, fiddles with the radio and dials in broadcasts familiar to Adelaide ears. Wait a minute, that bit of news just happened this morning. Yet the performers smoothly incorporate it. Amazing. Undressing to sheer jockey underdacks, they grapple each other into tiny footy-like shorts. Play wrestling raises the stakes between the two and more and more holds linger toward the crotch. Mock shock from the other, but oh. Fingers push each other’s faces into Francis Bacon-like distortions. But through the whole glorious hour, there is a lovely translation from eyeing each other off to getting very familiar.
Seeing this comic dance sustained for an entire show is an absolute joy to behold, the playfulness and virtuosity of these two accomplished comedic dancers astounds. The moves, directed by Hermes Gaido and choreographed by Nicolás Poggi and Rosso, are inventive, super tight and fast paced. I’m sure you’ve never seen one man sing into the mouth of another. For an encore, Luciano Rosso performs a mimed song in a funnily grotesque way – an extra gift for the audience. An hour of unrelenting fun and delight. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 28 Feb to 5 March
Where: AC Arts – Main Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au