Bakehouse Theatre. 6 Aug 2016
Swiss dramatist Max Frisch’s Biography: A Game, delves deeply into this need we have to believe it might be possible, somehow, if we could, to change our lives to improve it from the moments it tanked. We all want our life biography to be perfect, without regret.
Life has goals and obstacles, and is competitive; much like chess. Director/Designer Joh Hartog’s set references this, with its raised chess set platform in wood tones on which sits a coffee table, with a chess set with pieces as if a game’s already been played. A couch, glass top wooden cabinet, desk, chair, leather lounge chair and floor lamp shade offset the coffee table. It is cosy, middle class, theatrical.
Frisch’s human chess game with five human pieces takes place on a theatre stage. Biography: A Game is a play within a play. The tension generated between the sense on one hand, we seem to be watching a rehearsed theatre work, on the other, a real life relationship unravelling, is key to the gripping power of this production.
Hannes Kürmann (Tim Lucas) arrives home at 2am to find his partner Antoinette Stein (Krystal Brock) has just arrived before him, not in bed as expected. There’s confusion. She wants to stay up, pours a wine. Mild disagreement plays out. He has to go to work in the morning.
Stage right is a desk at which the Director (Adam Carter) and his assistants (Lisa Harper Campbell and Patrick Clements) sit. At the Director’s command, the scene stops. He replays it himself as Hannes, allowing Antoinette a different mode of play, all in demonstration for Hannes. The scene resumes. It ends badly. Hannes is not happy.
So begins a ‘game’ in which Hannes battles, more than works, with the Director to make changes in his relationships and professional life in such a way things will be pleasing, secure, worthy.
The struggle to control events, control people, control the story Hannes embarks on becomes a never ending trail of confusion, fearful introspection, fear, regret and longing. However Hannes works to stop/start or rewind events he cannot control; consequences springing from his choices.
Can we as an audience dismiss all this as a mere play, or should we allow ourselves a deeper, scarier relationship with Hannes’ genuinely frightening, emotionally crushing experiences, lightened as they are by superbly timed comic moments?
Is this life as we live it? Frisch’s essential question asked in this play, alongside, is there anything we can really do?
Hartog’s cast is a gutsy one, offering powerfully rich performances in which that delicate line between the comic and deeply tragic is maintained with exquisite perfection. Tim Lucas’s Hannes and Adam Carter’s The Director play off each other in a perfect devil-tempting-the-innocent relationship. Krystal Brock’s Antoinette burns with subtle energy and intent, while Patrick Clements and Lisa Harper Campbell’s stage hand/bit character roles enliven the dark pall of Frisch’s writing beautifully.
David O’Brien
When: 4 to 20 August
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre, Main Stage
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
One Point 618. 5 August
Quick Fix is a wonderfully rare thing in contemporary dance. It presents as a brilliant meld of pure theatre and pure dance, a superbly engaging exploration of the lure we call the ‘quick fix’, for our many needs and desires in text and movement.
Choreographer Katrina Lazaroff and creative collaborators/dancers Andrew Haycroft and Rebecca Bainger fashion a work where the set challenge is to balance the psychology of craving, needing things to be ‘perfect’, and how those things play out physically.
The greatest desired quick fix of all centres on the body; to be fitter, faster, thinner, smarter, and more attractive. Lazaroff’s choreography doesn’t merely focus on obvious physical tropes alluding to gym workouts, with assistance from two brilliantly used stepladder stools. There’s a dark and furious undertow to the sharp and angled energetic movement interplayed with rapid fire barked promises of media produced offers, promising to sate desire.
It’s as if Haycroft and Bainger are a couple drifting apart, as the male seeks more of what he wants promised by commercial media, and the female shrinks from it, during the middle phrases of the piece. Bainger’s expressed physical ease with fitness workouts can’t be matched by over large hulking Hayrcoft.
Which brings Haycroft and Bainger to the powerful core of Quick Fix. The deadening desire to shape others to meet unrealistic ideals is driven with superb power by Haycroft. He bends, twists, twirls and pivots Bainger’s body into representations of the ultimate male fantasy of the ‘perfect’ woman. In doing so, Bainger gives great expression of the false, plastic nature of this desired perfection. Haycroft’s body jerks and shakes like a junkie who just can’t get the fix right. He keeps telling us what he wants, tries creating and it and fails.
Is there an escape? Maybe.
David O’Brien
When: 5 August
Where: Marion Cultural Centre, Domain Theatre
Bookings: Closed
State Theatre Company. Space Theatre. 3 Aug 2016
Over the last couple of years during this centenary of World War I, we have had the opportunity to ponder on the woeful and astonishing project of Australians at war. The more personal the narrative, the more emotionally charged it has been for me. I won't soon forget the exhibition of primitive prosthetics in the Spirit of ANZAC Centenary Experience that was in Adelaide last March, or the morsels of sacrifice and pain written on the ridges and in the gullies of the Gallipoli battlefield. In State Theatre's The Red Cross Letters, another fascinating facet is revealed. The State Library of South Australia has a collection of over 8,000 packets of inquiries by loved ones as to the health or even whereabouts of their soldiers overseas, and replies from the relevant state branch of the Australian Red Cross Information Bureau. Most of the stories are South Australian, and the ringing of local towns and suburbs of Adelaide in the correspondence brought a faraway and long ago war to the here and now. The library entrusted local playwright Verity Laughton with twenty packets and she has incorporated eleven of these lives in this show.
It would be a stony heart indeed unmoved by this poignant material. A man drowns in the sea off Egypt saving other soldiers it's unlikely he even knew. Four brothers sign up to the same battalion; three are killed in France within hours of each other, how the fourth soldiered on to be wounded six months later is testimony to fortitude and courage beyond belief. But it is the desperation of those at home, pathetically yearning for scraps of information from the tyranny of distance, only to be drip-fed information over months or a year, that is most heart-rendering. And the replies, made with great patience by the bureaucracy in an attempt to be personal, had to be repeated not in 20 packets, or 8,000 packets, but for the more than 200,000 Australian casualties of that war.
The dramatic danger of the raw material is numbing the audience. Director Andy Packer's world premiere production looked no more sophisticated than a high school experimental effort that produced nothing new. The cast - comprising Matt Crook, Lizzy Falkland, Elizabeth Hay and Rory Walker - worked hard with about a dozen chairs, most unusually standing on them for some variety, and sometimes deftly maneuvering them like puppet masters. But there was not enough of the latter. Deliveries of the text were too often shrill - which was unattractive at length, and sometimes mechanistic with insufficient warming naturalism. I feel the letters need more help than Packer and Laughton provided.
More context would have enriched the experience. The portraits of the diggers was good, but the map of the Mid-North - thoughtfully centred on the home of one of Australia's most noted WWI veterans, Sir Hubert Wilkins, at Mt Bryan - was closer to what's needed. An association of the names of the sacrificed with their local town monuments, or the location of their demise in the theatre of war, were missed opportunities. And while showing a packet of sorts to the front row was good for the front row, the rest of us might have benefited from screen projections of some of the correspondence. I was often uncertain whose voice I was hearing. Matthew Gregan's haunting composition and live performance greatly enhanced the experience.
While I believe the raw material might have been better dealt with, it was a great and necessary project for these letters to be presented on stage with such reverential care, and you can't possibly leave this show the way you came in.
David Grybowski
When: 3 to 20 Aug
Where: Space Theatre 3-6 August, then on South Australian tour 8-20 August
Bookings: bass.net.au
Loaded Productions. Bakehouse Theatre. 10 Jul 2016
Good musical theatre should be about fun in very large part. That’s why it has songs and wit.
Sean Weatherly’s Price Check! The Musical is fun, unpretentiously so.
Supermarket comic sketches and characters are aplenty in the Australian lexicon. Weatherly doesn’t labour the point by seeking to emulate what’s been done before, or straining it to match Broadway.
Instead, we’re offered a delightful couple of days in the life style musical, of a funny little supermarket, its staff and a crazy regular.
It’s not so much the political goings on - as David (Sean Weatherly) and Zayeeb (Fahad Farooque) battle to convince the boss Mr Butler (Rory Walker) to promote them to Fruit and Veg Manager, or the lovelorn flirting of check out chick Narelle, (Catherine Campbell) let alone the fussing old Mrs Zimmerman (Jacqy Phillips) - that makes the show buzz. It’s the songs expressing their lives and battles that hold much of the magic and humour, as much as the characterisations.
Listen carefully beyond the obvious humour that comes with a song called I’m Just Nuts about Fruit, and you will catch comic allusions related to Australian music culture and start to really love this production.
Each performer is having a ball, thoroughly caught up in comedy of the character. Rory Walker’s Mr Butler fits him like a cosy sweater; Butler is a perpetually cranky middle aged career supermarket cartoon, but with real heart. Jacqy Phillips is adorable as the resident bargain hunting aged fussbudget. Catherine Campbell’s Narelle is sweetly droll, while Sean Weatherly and Fahad Farooque are perfect foils to each other, Farooque the one to steal the show.
Supported by a very on point chorus ensemble in Celeste Barone, Selena Britz, Barbara Nutchey and Ali Walsh, Price Check! The Musical had all the bounce needed for a fun twilight Sunday afternoon out.
David O’Brien
When: 6 to 16 July
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com
Australian Dance Theatre. Adelaide College of the Arts. 9 Jul 2016
History, time, and the flow of human obsessions are given the most thoroughly intelligent and fun-packed going over by choreographers Matte Roffe, Katrina Lazaroffe, Erin Fowler, Thomas Fonua and Lina Limosani.
Ignition, in its return to the ADT dance calendar, is just as exciting and valuable a means of showing off the choreographic caliber within the company, as it was always a means of belting out new ideas to think on.
Roffe’s Woolf! strips down Edward Albee’s 1962 play into 15 minutes of blazing choreography, managing to encapsulate gesturally all the restrained social and political norms of ‘50s relationships and of its two academic couples, the younger and older one.
Using a wall mirror on wheels allows this piece to go for speed, for hiding mysteries, revealing desire unburdened as it turns again and again. It’s full on stuff, injected with a 21st Century edge of awareness and urgency hinted at in the brilliant cheer leader rap delivered earlier in the work, “who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf?!”
Lazaroffe’s Caught in Past Tense really does physicalise that sense we’ve all had of being ‘stuck’ in past actions or words and trying to escape them. What makes it really work, beyond the supremely sharp choreography, is that ‘bang’ moment. That invisible, thousandth-of-a-microsecond moment, dividing what you did or said from the next moment you’re meant to do or say something else, but repeat yourself instead.
The dancers are constantly expressing this series of wildly frustrating moments that don’t move on properly at wonderfully graduated speed; be it stuffing a speech up, repacking a case that’s fallen open, asking a question of someone. There seems no escape from the ‘past’.
Fowler’s Epoch, in choreography and design, takes the most minimalist approach to that grand span of history the word epoch encompasses.
The lighting’s everything. White on black, muted shadows revealing a gently evolving series of gestures and acts we associate with historic moments of success and failure throughout history.
Fowler attempts to simultaneously show these things as separate to a specific ‘time’ as much as they are also a continuum ever unfolding. As separate white columns dividing dancers and actions slowly blend into a shared circle, separate gestures become points of interaction.
Fonua’s The Village is an excerpt of his MALAGA, performed at Tempo Dance Festival, New Zealand, in 2015.
Colonialism in history is dealt with to extraordinary effect in this piece. Fonua speaks of the top down power of colonisation, the human zoo, in his choreographer’s note.
The dancers spend much of the time close to the ground, on their knees.
They function in tightly organised physical subservience which suppresses everything of them; colour and character of their native dress, natural expressiveness of the body and interaction with others. They are very much on show, living as orchestrated beings, not human beings.
Yet within this suppression, Fonua realises a strength and a vibrancy in balance against the confinement enforced. With supreme grace, dancers glide across the floor with sweeping movements at the knees, colonisation cannot totally break down the cultural life that exists.
Limosani’s One’s Wicked Ways, a full length work commissioned for this season of Ignition, brilliantly gathers all the thematic strands of the four works preceding it in a fantastic, gloriously pleasing way.
One’s Wicked Ways liberates in dance the full emotive and dark comic force found in Frances’s greatest writers of farce, Moliere. There are many actors who would jealously wish they could dance, as to perform Limosani’s creation, it’s so good.
The social, moral and political decadence of Moliere’s time has many parallels with the behaviour of 21st Century elites. Complete debauchery, mockery of moral institutions, corruption of public institutions, and lip service paid to the law as it suits.
It’s a wild romp dressed in regal white.
With precise timing, Limosani has the ensemble play out wicked thrills and spills of excess to thralls of tittering laughter from the debauchees as they flit from one naughty act to the next. The appearance of the purple robed Cardinal/nobleman, the bogeyman of the self serving elite, sets up Limosani’s piece for its sharpest commentary. As he is seduced and flayed to near nothing, so he also rises in attack.
The playful choreography of debauchery gives way to a searing fury of symbolised violence. Limosani’s careful work becomes a brilliant exploration of two sides of history’s coin. Oppression, and being oppressed.
David O’Brien
When: 9 to 16 July
Where: Adelaide College of the Arts, Main Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com