National Theatre of Great Britain. Adelaide Entertainment Centre. 31 Jul 2018
Oh, what a set. What a mighty set. The high-tech cube has landed and settled in to the Entertainment Centre Theatre space to perform its feats of visual acrobatics. This remarkable piece of theatre design represents the mind of boy who is on the high functioning end of the autistic spectrum. It extrapolates in images those experiences which sometimes most calamitously overwhelm the boy’s senses and sometimes those which are solutions to his thinking. It endeavours to give audiences a visceral experience of the mysterious other-world of autism.
The boy, Christopher Boone, is the subject of the Simon Stephens play based on the best-selling book by Mark Haddon. It is quite an extraordinary play, presenting some of its peripheral characters not so much as cameos but as silvers of persona, pop-up and incidental, as if glanced from the corner of the eye. It also presents city hordes in marvellously choreographed motions by the cast.
The world is shown as 15-year-old Christopher perceives it. He lives with his father and his pet rat in Swindon. He’s a maths savant. He can’t bear to be touched. He is afraid of crowds and strangers.
The dead dog, Wellington, who has been brutally impaled on a garden fork, is an impasse for him. His quest is to find out who killed the dog. It will be his detective novel in the style of his hero, Sherlock Holmes, he vows.
Finding out who killed the dog throws Christopher’s world into mayhem, causing him to set out for London, all alone, by train and tube.
Therein, the stage becomes a drama of trains and tubes, incredibly effective with glaring headlights and tunnels and sound and chaos. It feels epic. Like a latterday Candide, Christopher finds his way.
Themes of relationships with parents and teachers, with love and loyalty and honesty as well as courage, general knowledge and maths are woven into the play and the stage is busy with light and form and spectacle - none greater than when Christopher runs around the walls.
The agility and stamina of Joshua Jenkins in the role of Christopher is simply breathtaking. It is exhausting to behold, not only the torrents of stilted dialogue but also the desperate, screaming panic attacks. It’s tour-de-force stuff and, unsurprisingly, he receives a standing ovation.
The large supporting cast also come with all the creamy calibre of West End theatre, most prominently Stuart Laing as Ed, Emma Beattie as Judy, and Julie Hale as Siobhan.
The debate goes on about whether or not Christopher truly is meant to represent a person with Aspergers or elsewhere on the autistic spectrum. There are arguments that this work is just about a mathematician who is different. This all seems precious chatter when the play itself is such a spectacular voyage into that strange world. Anyone who has had a relationship with an autistic person will want to grasp onto the depictions of frustration and physical otherness delivered in this play, not to mention the agonising dilemmas of parents and teachers trying to keep such troubled souls calm and secure.
It is a sensational piece of theatre in anyone’s terms, albeit sometimes very loud and overwhelming.
Alas, for Adelaide audiences, there is the problem of the venue. Once again, the lack of raked seating in the stalls denies the audience full view of the stage and what goes on at foot level. In this production, the floor is a crucial area whereupon a miniature world is laid out. Sadly, this was not visible to many. The Entertainment Centre really should consider bleacher seating at the least in this otherwise fine theatre space.
Samela Harris
When: 31 Jul to 4 Aug
Where: Adelaide Entertainment Centre Theatre
Bookings: curiousincident.com.au
Independent Theatre. Goodwood Theatre. 27 July 2018
Sadness and joy. Therein lies a balance so delicate and beautiful that it has been the great creative quest of poets and composers. Or so asserts this marvellous musical two-hander by Jon Marans.
It explores the evolving relationship between a brash and disgruntled young American prodigy pianist and the ageing Viennese music professor intent on proving that one may be a better accompanist if one understands the music from the perspective of the singer. The singing lessons upon which Stephen Hoffman reluctantly embarks become, over time, a deep lesson in life and love as well as music.
This Pulitzer-nominated play lingers upon the poetry of Heinrich Heine and the Robert Schumann song cycle, Dicherliebe. It also focuses on the power of language and the complexities of being Jewish.
Professor Mashkan is not the great piano teacher Hoffman was targeting in his trip to Vienna to vitalise his stalled music career. Singing lessons from Mashkan, a quaint and curmudgeonly old fellow, come as an unwelcome surprise imposed upon him as a preparation for work on the piano.
The play is set in 1986 with the impending election of Kurt Waldheim and the tourism-related restorations of Dachau strongly colouring its background.
David Roach embodies the intriguing old professor in an extraordinary performance which grows and grows as the play slowly reveals more about the old man. Director Rob Croser has embellished this process with some exquisite touches, most particularly and surprisingly in scene links on the darkened stage. Roach mimes the piano playing and he is no great singer. He is, however, one of the fine actors of this city and this role is a jewel of a vehicle for him.
Ben Francis has the privilege of playing against him as the angry young American. Francis is a wonderful singer and he has to rein in this talent to portray a man for whom singing is a secondary skill. He does not downplay the emotional aspects of the recalcitrant student snapping and sneering disrespectfully until one wants to smack him. This extreme behaviour must be close to the bone since playwright Jon Marans has said this play is semi-autobiographical and he was right there among those on their feet applauding the performances on opening night.
But, for the audience at the end of the night, the play belonged to the pure profundity of Roach’s characterisation. It was his.
The first half of the production is fairly slow going, setting up the denouement with a great deal of musical exploration and explanation. The audience finds itself quite literally present at a series of music lessons. After interval, the narrative takes off and is absolutely gripping. No spoilers.
The protagonists take turns at playing the grand piano and the sound is quite convincing that this is so. However, the true musical expertise comes from offstage and the hands of the masterful Mark Sandon.
The play’s lighting is absolutely superb, thanks to Bob Weatherly, and the set by Croser and Roach is extremely lush and busy but quite perplexing with its giant white pillars and asymmetry.
Fortunately, it’s the performances that count, and they are indeed ovation material.
Samela Harris
When: 27 Jul to 4 Aug
Where: Goodwood Theatre
Bookings: independenttheatre.org.au
State Theatre Company. Space Theatre. 24 July 2018
As the audience sat numb, emotionally drained by the melodramatic denouement of the play, the players miraculously leapt up beaming with delight to take their bows. The audience erupted with whooping acclaim. It had been an intense and gruelling experience. The three characters had stalked the gates of hell as they made their gambits in the name of love and lust and loss and recrimination and revenge. The actors had reached into the deepest resources of emotional pain and turmoil. They had pushed their voices to the edge of endurance. They had wrung the last drop of dismay from the emotional cloth. They had, all three, produced tour de force performances and delivered the most awful Strindberg tale of the Creditors.
August Strindberg wrote the play in 1888. Duncan Graham has adapted it into a contemporary Australian context. It’s a sleek adaptation which retains the play’s dramatic integrity impeccably while sparking it with modern references and vernacular.
The plot itself was and is strange and convoluted. Set in an elite lakeside resort, it tells of artist Adolph and his writer wife Tekla in an encounter with Gustav, who turns out to be Tekla's embittered ex-husband. Adolph is famous but also insecure and highly strung. While Tekla is away, Gustav anonymously befriends lonely Adolph and pours psychological toxin into the artist’s perception of his happy marriage. The ensuing paranoia, jealousy and suggested illness throw the marriage into mortal conflict. The play is barbed and dark but, astutely directed by David Mealor, it is edged with humour and irony.
The debts to which the Creditors title refers are love and fidelity.
Peter Kowitz plays Gustav, the magnificently manipulative silverback ex-husband. His performance is not only expertly two-faced but also two-voiced as he firstly uses gravel-edged masculine authority to work on Adolph’s sensitivities and then softly submissive tones to apply Gustav's wiles to the ex-wife. It is a committed and engrossing performance. His Machiavellian expression at the play’s climactic moment is unforgettable.
The celebrated young Adelaide actor Matt Crook embodies poor Adolph, the vain and impressionable artist who loves his free-spirited wife too much. He is light of voice and limb in his depiction of this dupe, descending into petulance and despair. Of three pretty awful characters, his is the least likeable character. This is sharply paradoxical and one of the facets which give life and issue to the play.
It is terrible Tekla who steals the heart and the production. Caroline Craig devours this role with breathtaking dynamism. She is the light and dark of life, confident and coquettish at one moment and a tornado of righteous fury in another. It is a grand, dramatic character and she holds back no hue from her wonderful actor’s palette, one moment an elegant beauty, the next a virulent harridan.
Occasional piano strains tinkle through the production, more a commentary than a soundscape from Quentin Grant.
A third of the Space Theatre is used for designer Ailsa Paterson’s elegant resort setting. It has a minimalist Scandinavian feel, rattan summery decor, orange leather furnishings and a vast wind-ruffled lake projected beyond picture windows framed by boughs of eucalypt. An extremely esoteric stylised water jug downstage on a traymobile seems bottomless from the many glasses of water the characters pour, the refreshment one soon realises as much a necessity for vocal lubrication as for a handy prop. It is a vocally demanding play and one hopes that the sterling cast will see the season through without a croak. Best hasten in to see this passionate powerhouse of a production, just in case.
Samela Harris
When: 20 Jul to 5 Aug
Where: The Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Loaded Productions. Marion Cultural Centre. 19 July 2018
No, Tom Lehrer is not dead. He is 90 years old and living in California while his 37 satirical songs are living all over the enlightened world, particularly in Adelaide right now where Loaded Productions has revived the Tom Foolery revue to sate the eternal hunger of avid Lehrer fans old and new. The thing is, mathematician Lehrer’s wickedly funny lyrics still resonate more than half a century since many of them were penned. Controversially, five of the songs were banned when Lehrer first came to the prudish Adelaide of 1960. That would not happen now but the two Loaded performers who happen also to be cabaret teachers report that many of the lyrics have a whole new shock factor among the current young generation. They are too far “out there”, too politically incorrect for today’s culturally sensitive young.
The scary thing is that the songs and their sentiments really have not aged. Oh yes, there are a couple more elements “discarvered" than Lehrer knew back then at Harvard but pollution and politics are still with us.
The Loaded team has thrown in some local references to sharpen the satiric barb here and there and it shares out the singing load with harmonies and comic interactions. Most importantly, director Nicholas Cannon has honoured the show’s original direction and choreography by the late and much-loved Michael Fuller, to whom the production is dedicated. And, indeed, watching Hew Parham sometimes feels almost like watching Fuller himself. Parham is a lovely mover. And, like his peers onstage, he knows plenty about singing and comic timing. Sean Weatherly adds the impish quality to the trio. He can’t seem to lose that adorable quality and that glint of mischief in the eye. It works like magic in the Lehrer show. And, of course, there is Catherine Campbell, not only hitting the high notes but cracking up the crowd with the comic shtick. In bright red dress, bottle in hand, her version of the Irish Ballad, many recall as the Rickety-tickety-tin song, is a glorious, booze-sodden epic. Parham gives a deliciously delicate charm to the Old Dope Peddler and Sean leaves the audience breathless with his tongue-twisting finesse with The Elements and then again with the arithmetic acrobatics of New Math.
With slick sound and lighting from Bob Weatherly, the show is played with three red stools for the singers and a big black piano from which Mark Sandon brilliantly lays out that other wonderful Lehrer touch, a wild and lively musical foundation. He’s a champion performance in himself.
And is an old hit eminently hit-worthy yet again.
Samela Harris
When: 18 to 22 Jul
Where: Marion Cultural Centre
Bookings: marionculturalcentre.com.au
The Imperial Ice Stars. Adelaide Entertainment Centre. 18 Jul 2018
The Imperial Ice Stars take the genre of ballet on ice up several notches into an arguably unprecedented level of spectacle and excellence.
Its Swan Lake on Ice is simply breathtaking.
There are not enough superlatives for the athleticism and flawless expertise of the international skaters. The production is lush and beautiful while at the same time edged with danger. There are thrillingly flamboyant circus touches such as fire on ice and a swan who actually takes off and flies and flies and flies.
Tchaikovsky’s music soars, as performed by the Manchester Symphony Orchestra, and the fable of the bewitched swan and the handsome prince follows its traditional narrative through dark and light, love and loss, good and bad to a contenting climax followed by, oh balletomanes, turn away, a joyful, athletic encore.
It is Bogdan Berezenko as Prince Siegfried who lifts this production to dream status. Here is a tall, lanky Ukrainian skater who marries magnificence in skating skill with a beautifully brooding romantic presence. He is as much an actor as a vividly athletic skater, perchance today's Nureyev of the ice.
He is surrounded by quality, particularly in his romantic partner, Olga Sharutenko as Odette, the princess cursed into swan form by the wicked sorcerer. She astounds the audience with her exquisite flying and charms them when she swaps skates for toe shoes and dares to dance en pointe on the ice. With Berezenko, she flows and rears and rises and spins in myriad magnificent skating lifts while always conveying the sweetness and poignancy of the swan. As for her flock in their soft drapes of white skirt and little swan headdresses, they ebb and flow and swirl and, oh yes, tippy toe comically against the restless waters of the lake projected on the backdrop behind them. The corps de skating ballet at all times is energy and precision and ever wreathed in radiant smiles. The assorted champion and Olympic skaters therein embody graceful courtly dancers and exuberant folk-dancing peasants in a versatility of handsome, sometimes gymnastic, routines under the artistic direction of Tony Mercer.
Stanislav Pertsov plays the prince’s perky friend, Benno. He is a very showy, clever skater spraying ice in his wild spirals, leaps and slides. He also is a forceful comic presence. The lithe and vivacious Maria Mukhortova depicts Odile, the beautiful rival her sorcerer father Rothbart contrives to steal the prince’s heart. Sergei Lisev, a powerful and imposing skater, plays this classic villain.
The production sustains its energy and beauty throughout the two complex acts incorporating all sorts of surprises, not the least which is some daring silk work.
Albina Gabueva’s glorious costumes and the gentle animations within Eamon d’Arcy’s set projections add lushness to what is a simply dazzling show.
The only negative for Adelaide audiences is the staging at the Entertainment Centre’s theatre annex. The height of the ice stage is such that those seated in the stalls cannot see the skaters’ footwork, a flaw the Centre and tour organisers might amend for future shows.
But the opening night audience for this show was eminently forgiving, responding to the show with whooping and well-deserved acclaim.
Samela Harris
When: 18 to 22 Jul
Where: Adelaide Entertainment Centre
Bookings: premier.ticketek.com.au