The State Opera of South Australia. Festival Theatre. 18 Apr 2017
‘Uno squarcio di vita’ (a slice of life) perfectly sums up Director Andrew Sinclair, Conductor Nicholas Braithwaite and Designer Shaun Gurton’s riveting double bill; Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci.
Both are deeply intense Italian works, steeped in rich emotion, religion, passion and human frailty developed with extreme, loving care by Sinclair and Braithwaite. The themes of both may seem the same, but the nexus of love lost, illicitly found, and jealousy gives decidedly different focus of expression in each work. It’s this ability of the creative team to extract from Masacagini and Leoncavallo’s works the individual heart felt agony of the characters, making this double bill evening so engaging and emotionally rewarding, especially for those for whom Italian sung is like sweet nectar to the senses.
The lead in to Cavalleria Rusticana is delicious in its simplicity, both musically and in staging. Shaun Gurton's superb rustic villa setting, with two sides of buildings reaching towards each other backstage profoundly concentrates attention to the action, especially centre stage. Donn Byrnes’ lighting catches illicit shadows. Offstage, loving praise is sung of Lola (Catriona Barr). Turiddu (Rosario La Spina) appears in dawn light, followed closely by Santuzza (Jacqueline Dark) who was the woman he accepted a smoke from?
In that moment it is immediately clear Turiddu is a philanderer. Santuzza, his wronged partner, clutches a suitcase and Lola, a married woman who is Turiddu's conquest. It won’t end well, we know. How all goes wrong on this Easter Sunday, is what we want to know.
At the heart of Cavalleria Rusticana is a profound, heartfelt, achingly deep Catholicism in struggle with a culture of machismo and hard set attitudes to ‘fallen’ women. Turiddu chances it for the love of Lola on being caught by her husband Alfio (Jeremy Tatchell.) Santuzza powerfully appeals to the Virgin Mary in the face of total loss and humiliation in a bravado performance from Dark.
La Spina and Dark are perfectly matched in evoking a battle of deep love against an immoral one. They tear the stage up as Turiddu rejects her, only for Santuzza to again appeal, then resorting to informing Lola’s husband, after facing up to Lola in a terrific scene between a woman scorned and a woman scorning. Catriona Barr’s Lola is played with elegant and precise arrogance against Dark’s emotive righteousness. In song, they are rich in brittle contrast.
Jealousy begets rage, begets revenge, begets death.
Not content to wow an audience with one lead role, Rosario La Spina appears as Canio, the alcoholic, violent, jealous husband of Nedda (Joanna McWaters) in I Pagliacci. Leoncavallo's opera superbly offers opportunity to play off rage and blood soaked reality against a commedia play Canio’s Pagliaccio’s company tour to a favourite town.
Gurton's set, an open air theatre space which the touring players inhabit, is cage like with its scaffold stage providing the perfect space in which the unfolding, deranged blend of play and murder will unfold.
The love triangle of deformed clown drummer Tonio (Douglas McNicol), Nedda’s lover Silvio (Jeremy Tatchell), and Canio is pungent with cruelty, loss, hatred, desire, jealousy, and pain. The shifts between these states of feeling in this trio of twisted interrelationships are handled with admirably deft pacing both musically and dramatically.
Nedda’s cruelty laden rejection of Tonio after McWaters’ wonderful expression of Nedda’s fear, loneliness and desire for freedom encapsulates the vicious emotional dual lives these characters live as human beings and performers. McNicol is fantastic in his ability to enliven Tonio with a suffering misery and wickedness quite shocking in sung delivery.
It’s La Spina’s performance as Canio which carries I Pagliacci. In a demonstration of supreme sung characterisation expressing inner sorrow and loss one is moved to sympathy, for as much of the murderous, savage madness one reviles, La Spina is at once the sad clown and a man unhinged.
Brilliantly partnered with McWaters, La Spina’s progression from jealous drunk to murderous madman is spellbinding as he spirals closer and closer to murder.
State Opera’s double bill is sharp, pointed, pleasing operatic fare that pulls no punches, leaving one well sated.
David O’Brien
When: 18, 20, & 22 April
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Photography by Ali Feo
Adelaide Repertory Theatre. Arts Theatre. 6 Apr 2017
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett’s dramatisation of The Diary of Anne Frank is a solid old history play, well known in theatre circles as a long one. This should have been the clue for The Rep director Geoff Brittain to give it a thrust of energy or a bit of a cut to fully engage a modern audience. The arduous pace of this new production is just about the only thing wrong with it. Of course it could be argued that the audience needs to suffer for its art, to feel the ennui to get a taste of the long and strange time that Anne Frank describes in hiding from the Nazis from 1942 to 1944 in Amsterdam.
One hopes that, as the play runs in, the action and inflections may pep up.
Ole Weibkin has devised an extraordinarily complex and labyrinthine set to depict the office building annex in which two Jewish families plus the dentist Dussell were confined. The set reaches from the rig to the wings to the apron and back again, seemingly dark, dense and dusty and claustrophobic as well the hiding place must have been. Therein, Richard Parkill's lighting completes the mood, dull when the world is working in the offices below, bright only in the secrecy of night.
The production has been well cast and, despite the pace, there are some lovely performances. There are the seasoned skills of Nicole Rutty and Therese Hornby as sweet Mrs Frank and insufferable Mrs Van Daan, along with the strengths of Tim Williams as kind Otto Frank and Tim Taylor as the unpleasant Mr Van Daan with Chris Leech most effectively stress-inducing as the dentist Dussell.
Genevieve Venning is endearing as Anne's quiet big sister, Margot, while Ronan Banks has just the right adolescent awkwardness as Peter Van Daan. Heroic from the outside world, the protectors of the hidden Jews come and go with rations and news of the war. Stuart Pearce plays good Mr Kraler with Esther Michelsen delightfully simpatico as Miep. They appear and disappear from below, arriving each time on stage with a convincing sense of having climbed some pretty awkward stairs. But it is the young Henny Walters in a big wig of glistening black hair who charms and compels as the famous child diarist.
Henny is still at school and is a clearly a talent with a shining future.
There are some oddities to the production, not the least of them the amount of time the director has his lead with her back to the audience. One sees her close up on a screen over the blackout window now and then through the play delivering verbatim extracts from her diary. The audio-visual fades in and out are awkward, but one feels the intention to segue back into the live action. There also is the mixture of accents. The young characters are performed without accents at all. As the audience becomes consumed in the tensions of the lives depicted, the details of accents fades away - a successful gamble by the director.
The production wins in the end. Final curtain generates resounding applause.
It is not a great play but it is one of the important stories of history made all the more heart-rending by being told by a doomed young girl so full of life and hope. The first night audience was mainly Repertory subscription patrons - but this play really needs to be seen by secondary students.
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 22 Apr
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: 8212 5777 or adelaidrep.com
Brink Theatre Company in association with State Theatre Company and Adelaide Festival Centre. Space Theatre. 4 Apr 2017
The portrait on the poster says it all. Pure exhaustion after a great battle is shown in a digger's face spattered with the red mud of Vietnam and the gore of his mates. This is the story of Delta Company, 6RAR, and their ordeal on the 18th of August, 1966, when their patrol encountered an overwhelmingly superior size force of North Vietnamese readying to attack their base.
Director Chris Drummond and his creative team have forged an emotionally immersive theatrical experience. The audience is placed on the fringes of the field of fire by flanking a long traverse representing the rubber plantation where the fire fight took place (Wendy Todd - designer). It's surfaced with loose, black rubber chips that Barry Kosky left behind after his Saul production. The soldiers wallow in it, slip on it, and die clutching it, leaving behind an orange silhouette, like a detective's chalk outline.
Every audience member is supplied with headphones. Through these, composer and sound designer Luke Smiles invites you to hear the mosquitoes, and the explosions and gunfire, which are never nearly as loud as described in the testimonials of the diggers who were there. More importantly, though, the headphones allowed the actors to shift their technique to something in between film and live performance. Whispered dialogue was easily overlapped and audible, and allowed an intimacy disconcertingly coupled with disembodiment. Lighting designer Chris Petridis used lasers to paint a battlefield alive with dancing and deadly tracers.
Australian playwright Verity Laughton was arrested protesting against the war back in the day, and felt that she didn't ever properly acknowledge the humanity of the diggers. For this reconciliation, she interviewed some of the Long Tan fighters and their families - indeed, anybody that would talk to her about the afternoon battle - and transposed their testimony into a military drama. You really got to know these blokes and there was nothing more moving than Nic Krieg's character, Salveron, rising from the battlefield after being mortally shot and haunting the battlefield in its most violent moment. Laughton undertook a lengthy epilogue that detailed some of the trauma that the survivors and their loved ones endured in the days, weeks and years following. This assuaged a curiosity I'm sure I shared with other audience members. Further background material is available in the program, in photos of the actual warriors, and in numerous interviews that can be viewed in the theatre lobby (Malcolm McKinnon - AV exhibition).
However, the didactic explanation of the origin of the American War was unnecessary for the informed, and too rushed for the novices. Also, the two Vietnamese characters - most often a mother and son - were not always convincing except in an oddly satisfying flash forward scene mid-battle. You know what? I couldn't help think about my recent viewing of The Secret River during the Adelaide Festival, and relating these two instances of intrusive invaders.
The cast were a well-drilled ensemble. In the after-show discussion I attended, a question arose concerning the conveyance of fear. I would have thought to have seen people scared out of their wits, but I was somewhat persuaded that survival was attained by calculated training and men doing their jobs. I wasn't there and I'll never know, but this is a good example of one of the thousands of directorial choices Chris Drummond would have had to make in a brand new play.
This is a world premiere full of technical and performance complexities achieved with five weeks rehearsal, which is not enough time for the full virtuosity of the creative team and actors to be revealed. Yet, I left the theatre shaken and stirred and exhausted and amazed. There were no winners at Long Tan that day, but there was a lot of bravery.
David Grybowski
When: 31 Mar to 8 Apr
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Lunchbox Theatrical Productions and Stage Presence in association with David Atkins Enterprises, ABA, and Kenny Wax Limited. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 29 Mar 2017
If there were to be PhD distinction for theatrical ham, The Play That Goes Wrong would provide the all-immersive qualification.
This is a work of epic shtick.
If ever there was a piece of classic cornball silly business, it is this ridiculous production. The old British manor house set is constantly at war with the actors. Doors don’t work. Things fall off walls. Actors try to save the situation while the play goes on. Props are not where they should be. Actors improvise. Actors come to grief. Backstage crew steps in with scripts. But the show goes on.
Long looks and frozen moments. Actors reading from cues on their hands. Words they simply cannot pronounce. Every disaster compounded by yet another calamity. Every actor’s nightmare. But the show goes on.
This audience member laughed until her ribs ached. And then she laughed some more.
Not everyone was creased in hilarity. Some seemed just a bit nonplussed to have paid high ticket prices to witness bad acting and technical ineptitude on a grand scale.
But in the extremity of badness lies the supreme skill.
These actors deliver the high art not only of acting but of clowning. Come on down Jacques Lecoq, the greatest clown teacher of them all. His artistry is all over this cast. And the athleticism of circus skills. Physical comedy is heightened by danger and danger is averted only by split-second timing and precise technical planning.
There is a plot, of course. It is The Murder at Haversham Manor set in the 1920s. The audience is told that this production by Britain’s Mischief Theatre Company is actually from the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society and there are comprehensive spoof program notes to underscore this assertion. Hence, the actors play actors playing roles.
It is murder most mysterious and through the rowdy chaos of mishaps, mis-cues and mistakes, somehow it is solved. Of course, by that time, no one in the audience really cares. They are weary with laughter and a sense of incredulity that levels of hysteria could be sustained for so very long.
The cast on this touring production is mainly Australian with one American and a “token Pommie”. He is James Marlow who plays Max Bennett playing Cecil Haversham. There is not a comic nuance this actor does not deliver while vaulting furniture and manhandling imaginary dogs. A sublime performance. But he’s in very good company since all the cast - Tammy Weller, Brooke Satchwell, Luke Joslin, George Kemp, Adam Dunn, Darcy Brown and Nick Simpson-Deeks - excel on the high plateau of supple-bodied melodramatic excess.
The Play That Goes Wrong was written by Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields, and directed by Mark Bell with James Marlow as Resident Director.
The show is brought to Adelaide by Lunchbox Theatrical Productions, Stage Presence in association with David Atkins Enterprises, ABA, and Kenny Wax Limited with one-time South Australian showbiz luminary Jon Nicholls as its Executive Producer. Nicholls’s opening night cameo stage appearance apologising for the first technical fault was a wee treat for the Adelaide theatre people who remembered his heyday with the Arts Council and Promcon.
And, those of us who fall apart at entirely farcical theatrical nonsense thank them one and all for delivering this award-winning gem downunder.
Samela Harris
When: 29 Mar to 2 Apr
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Adelaide Fringe. Strut and Fret Production House. Magic Mirror Spiegeltent at The Garden of Unearthly Delights. 19 Mar 2017
Perhaps seeing all of Strut and Fret’s shows is a bad thing? Perhaps one’s expectations are harder to meet when the company has already produced so much outstanding content? Like a sequel that fails to live up to the original.
The latest offering from the Strut and Fret Production House is entitled Blanc de Blanc, and is an homage to French champagne. The show is a celebration of that bubbly beverage, and the performers all take on their characters with guts and gusto.
Every one of them is extremely talented, absolutely gorgeous; supremely fit, and specialises in their own unique brand of entertainment, be it circus, clowning, acrobatics, contortion, comedy, or burlesque. But it seems they have all been thrust into a show which lacks a solid vision; the excitement and risk that has made Strut and Fret famous, fails to materialise for very long.
There are some really great acts in this show, and one hears people speak of them in absolute awe – a gravity defying pole performance in a concierge’s luggage trolley; the spectacular antics of a hula-hooping contortionist; a graceful and sexy mid-air dance between two soap soaked acrobats suspended from The Magic Mirror Spiegeltent – but this list is exhaustive. That is all of the truly edgy acts you are likely to see (Note: this performance didn’t feature Shun Sugimoto). Like an action packed film trailer you’ve just heard all the best bits. The rest of the 2 hour production feels a lot like self-indulgent fluff and filler; a selfie-break mid-show allows the audience to take photos with the performers, most of us awkwardly sit and watch!
Loosely based on champagne, and full of little dance interludes that are more like connective tissue than acts, Blanc de Blanc doesn’t really showcase the specialist skills of anyone, other than Spencer Novich and his perfectly timed comedy genius. One finds oneself waiting for something to happen… and being disappointed when nothing does.
The show is fast paced and high energy. It has all of the expected production values of a Strut and Fret show; spectacular sound and lighting, amazing costumes, and slick stage production. It is, however, not particularly well suited for the round, with much of the action on the main stage and almost everything performed out front.
For the most part the audience get into the celebration of champagne and they seem to love it. All of the feedback seems to have been positive, so one returns to the opening of this review to ponder why we failed to be inspired.
Blanc de Blanc didn’t seem to have the dynamics of its predecessors. It does have a lot more nudity, and as exciting as that can be, the novelty quickly wears off. Despite all this it still appears to be winning the praises of audiences and critics alike.
Paul Rodda
When: 19 Mar
Where: Magic Mirror Spiegeltent at The Garden of Unearthly Delights
Bookings: Closed. Tour continues around the country