Matt Byrne’s My Kitchen Fools

Adelaide Fringe. Matt Byrne Media. Maxim’s Wine Bar. 5 Mar 2017

 

Byrne packs ‘em like sardines into Maxim’s on the Parade, but the audience doesn’t seem to mind! The cosy upstairs venue at Norwood fits about 100, though I’m told it has had up to 130 with standing room only. Such is the draw of Byrne’s home grown shows. Every year now for 20 earthy rotations of the sun he has created a bawdy spoof on a topical theme; this time around it is channel 7’s My Kitchen Rules.

 

Confession: I’ve been an MKR tragic for 8 seasons, but the format is really wearing thin, and Byrne has identified most of the reasons why in his hilarious two (+) hour show.

The time absolutely flies by, and by the end of the performance one is doubled over with aching ribs from all of the laughing.

 

The jokes flow thick and fast. There are puns-a-plenty and even more innuendo; but it is the performers' characterisations that steal the show, and they all have more than one standout in their repertoire.

 

The cast of four – Matt Byrne, Niki Martin, Marc Clement, and Stefanie Rossi – play at least 15 characters including the celebrity chefs and the contestants within the show.

 

Byrne plays the Gordon Ramsay rip-off, Gordon Ramraid, and almost manages the same level of vocal intensity as the all-swearing, all-shouting celebrity chef. As the ever camp Scotsman, Colin, he finds his pace and slides effortlessly into the role, highland dancing and all. Niki Martin gives us Nigella’s Awesome with sultry style. No melon is left un-creamed in her raunchy rendition, and yet Martin’s Yiayia Moussaka is her standout character and an absolute crowd pleaser.

 

Marc Clement spectacularly shifts from one character the next and gives each 150%. His Jamie Bolivar lisps and lilts over dialogue with uncanny accuracy. As Byrne’s Scottish partner, Justin, Clement ramps up the camp, and his Master Moussaka is scarily accurate. Stefanie Rossi makes the fab four complete, with a lesser known celebrity chef in Rachel Rayban but still makes her larger than life. Rossi shines as the hippy niece Moonbeam alongside Byrne as Daddy Moontides, and really breaks new ground with her Asian inspired cooking demonstration as celebrity chef, Pooh (with an ‘h’).

 

The small stage doesn’t hamper the big numbers and choreography and audience participation is full tilt, with an Adriano Zumbo inspired Zorba the Greek dance breaking out. Plenty of other characters make an appearance, including Clement’s python that just can’t resist a good pheasant plucking.

 

Ultimately the winning team is decided by audience acclimation, and just like in real life it is the personalities that win the day – not the cooking.

 

With another two weeks of shows remaining there are plenty of opportunities to get a solid dose of potty humour and laugh until you snort inappropriately, so be sure to make the trek up the Parade and don’t miss this, the 20^th year of spoof for MBM.

 

Paul Rodda

 

When: 5 to 19 Mar

Where: Maxim’s Wine Bar, Norwood

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

The Secret River

Adelaide Festival. Sydney Theatre Company presented by Adelaide Festival and State Theatre Company of SA. Anstey’s Quarry. 5 Mar 2017

 

It was an act of genius by Neil Armfield to locate The Secret River in Anstey’s Quarry.

The Kate Grenville saga is about home but it is also about the lure and significance of the Australian landscape. Armfield has made the landscape star of the show.

Every way in which the mighty open-cut cliff face of the quarry is presented is in some way awe-inspiring.

 

With Mark Howett’s superb lighting, it adds mood and comment to every moment of the play.

As the audience arrives, the quarry is beautiful in sunlight, showing off the rich veins of warm ochre hues which are so typical of the Australian landscape. Blackened saplings cling perilously to the rock face. Spreading, leafy eucalypts are silhouetted on its crest.

 

As the sun sets, the piercing blue sky turns to amber and the rocks glow. Then, throughout the night, the rocks play their part in the play, sometimes mottled and cheerful, sometimes playing with the dancing shadows of the actors, sometimes ominous and dark, sometimes sharply illuminated and etched in their own shadows. The stars come out above. Wind rustles the trees.

It also whips through the audience perched on bleachers.

Warm day turns to chilly night. Very chilly. Audience members huddle in rugs and cling together. They suffer for their art.

But they are rewarded.

 

Grenville’s plot line is well known, here deftly re-imagined for the stage by our beloved playwright Andrew Bovell. It is the tale of naive, barely literate English convicts claiming land with no comprehension that the land is already occupied by Aboriginal people. Thus is it the confrontation of white and black, the misguided concept of Terra Nullius. The audience knows it will not end well.

 

When William Thornhill gets his pardon and takes his family up into Hawksbury, he lays claim to glorious land which he soon finds is occupied by Dharug people. They don’t understand each other. He wants them to go away. They want him to go away. He wants to grow corn on the land. They have always harvested prized native food there.

 

The early interactions are tense but slowly, once Thornhill’s young son has befriended the Aboriginal children, an uneasy friendship begins to emerge. Thornhill finally realises that there is much to learn from the original inhabitants.

 

However, the Thornhills are not the only white settlers in the area.

 

Bovell and Armfield paint these white settlers as truly ugly people, ignorant and morally squalid. Criminals. Cockney scum, not the sort to respect Colonial decrees about not killing the Aboriginals.

Armfield makes them into caricatures and the actors clearly relish the freedom to ham it up to the hilt, especially Richard Piper as the violent and scary Smasher Sullivan. There’s gravy on his ham.

Bruce Spence with long oily hair and whiteface is rather ghoul-like; shades of Lurch from the Addams Family.

 

Saggity, played by Matthew Sunderland, is crass and boorish and Dan Oldfield, the convict Thornhill takes on as staff, is fresh blood and a wily wheeler dealer. Then there is the tough old Mrs Herring, a pipe-chewing survivor. It is a fabulous cameo role nicely embodied by Jennifer Hagan.

 

Most interesting is Thomas Blackwood who has respected and liked the Aboriginals and settled down happily with an Aboriginal woman. Colin Moody is simply wonderful in this role, dignified, powerful and wise. One loves him. His wife is played by Ningali Lawford Wolf who also plays the immense role of narrator. She is a magnificent presence on stage. The sharp clear edge of her voice pierces the night air and not a word is lost, even to the echoes of the cliff face.

 

The Aboriginal cast altogether is superb. Steven Goldsmith is graceful and stately as Yalamundi, the Elder. Frances Djulibing is both funny and moving as old Buryia and it is pleasing to see that Bovell has allowed the Aboriginal sense of humour to shine brightly through this adaptation. It makes all the more appalling the bloody denouement of the play - and the human tragedy of our colonial history.

 

The other tribal members are played delightfully by Natasha Wanganeen, Shaka Cook, Dylan Miller, Marcus Corowa and alternating lads as the younger child Garraway. These all are strong, generous and committed performances - and brave, considering their bare skin in the chilly night quarry.

 

While the white father, William, is the force of the Cockney family central to The Secret River and Nathaniel Dean’s husky voice and Cockney twang emphasise the contrast of the two races, it is his wife Sal and the compassionate performance of Georgia Adamson who delivers the heart and soul of the story. Their two sons are played by a changing cast of young people on alternate nights, and very well too, judging by the Saturday night lads.

 

Armfield has delivered to this potent work some very special elements, not the least of them the pack of Smasher’s fierce dogs played by the male actors on long pieces of rope. They are almost more believable than the real thing.

 

The Stephen Curtis set and the Iain Grandage music complement the dramatic entity ideally. However, when it comes to the greatest impact of this Festival experience, it is Anstey and the lighting which will linger forever in mind’s eye.

 

Samela Harris

 

When: 5 to 19 Mar

Where: Anstey’s Quarry

Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au

How’s Your Acting Going?

Adelaide Fringe. Louise O’Dwyer. The GC. 4 Mar 2017

 

Never base your identity on your job, is advice often handed out. Interestingly, for performing artists, that’s a bit of a bind, given so much of who they are is actually bound up in that core sense of being one, and so much of the self is expended in being so.

 

Louse O’Dwyer’s smooth running 50 minute one act piece allows her to offer an audience of non-performers the unique experience of being on the end of the question every actor hates at stages of their lives. “How’s your acting going?”

 

A series of friends, relatives and side player characters pop up to give their momentary take on that actor friend or relative, and it’s not really very pretty, if at times delightfully funny.

 

From the harshness of a caring rellie at a family BBQ, to the unseen, unheard director auditioning Louise, it becomes brutally clear how little anyone really cares for or understands this acting thing.

 

The sweet irony of an actor creating a series of characters – who represent experiences in which said actor’s whole sense of self respect as a human being is overlooked because they’re an actor – is not easy to ignore.

 

O’Dwyer’s creations are quirky, fallible, cracked people, delivered with disciplined restraint. What animates all of them is an unfailing desire, conscious or not, to actually care about or understand the actor in the same way they might ask in earnest of someone else, “how’s your career going?”

Think about that.

 

David O’Brien

 

When: 28 Feb to 11 March

Where: The GC (The German Club)

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au

Anya Anastasia: Rogue Romantic

Adelaide Fringe. Anya Anastasia. Royal Croquet Club. 2 March 17

 

Roguish femininity never came in such a beguiling and wit rich mere hour package.

 

Anya Anastasia was at once Marilyn Monroe, Marie Antoinette and and a ‘demure’ Jane Austen like romantic as she seduced, traduced and spun her audience’s minds, that their hearts might be hers – with some sincere, deep eyed lilting, and pressured passion.

 

In an evening of love between herself and an easily love struck audience her command was everything. We joined her in an apocalyptic love party in which the dangers of the present were forgotten that we might, together, love.

 

The genius in the work - as always with an Anastasia creation - is wit, in physical performance, and word, which spins against cliches by substituting stock observations with eye opening, unexpected quirkiness (referencing clichés, nonetheless).

 

As our paramour sought out her perfect lover, railed in angered sadness, he was not to be found. An audience member is teased and loved here and there and pounced on as a hopeful romantic conquest, one got the sense that either we (the audience) are in love, or she’s too needy for us?

 

Supporting and blessing the performance was a superb, jazz band who added support in their role as living, breathing scenic extras. Their rich, vibrant genre-crossing musical capability is executed with such calm restraint, yet confident hard-core attitude that it made for a complete, passionate, humorous, sexy evening.

 

David O’Brien

 

When: 2 to 19 March

Where: Royal Croquet Club, The Blsvk Forest

Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au