Adelaide Festival. State Theatre Company of South Australia – Scenic Workshop.
Veteran Sydney actor Barry Otto's abrupt departure from this long-planned and much-promoted State Theatre production was the biggest shock of the Adelaide Festival of 2013.
The septuagenarian star's departure, attributed to the stress of the demanding solo role, left the South Australian flagship theatre company with an expensive set and furiously-finessed production enhancements devoid of content.
Enter Renato Musolino, popular Adelaide actor and former Flying Penguins ensemble member. He stepped in and fulfilled the season script-in-hand.
Audience members were offered ticket refunds if their hearts were set on an Otto performance. Instead, more and more people bought tickets to see the local boy. And the disaster of the Festival turned into a heroic triumph.
Ironically, Rentato would have been a better choice from the outset. The Kreutzer Sonata is Tolstoy's dark tale of Pozdnyshev, a vain and misogynistic man cursed by an undercurrent of seething jealousy and white rage. As Pozdnyshev describes his marriage, the birth of his children and his wife's relationship with a violinist, one feels comfortable that he is embodied by the young Mussolino. It does not seem to be the tale of an old man, but of one who has destroyed his life in his prime, killing his lovely wife in a frenzy of paranoid spite.
And thus, out of the negative, comes the positive. It seems the production may have gained in terms of context.
The presence of the script in the actor's hand does not detract, albeit there is a sense that Mussolino is finding his way amid the assorted idiosyncrasies of the characters he is voicing. Having picked up the script when the show was already in front of audiences, his has been a race to find the emphases - and it has been valiant.
He earns his standing ovations.
The rest of Geordie Brookman's Festival production remains as it was originally created - with musical accompaniment from pianist Gabriella Smart with violinist Elizabeth Layton eerily perched high in a cyclone cage up fleets of stairs on a towering side wall.
The Geoff Cobham set in the State Theatre Company's cavernous Scenic Workshop is dark and industrial. The Tolstoy story itself was linked to train trip - and a tale told to the narrator by a fellow traveller. Cobham has used high-set metal platforms and walkways over a watery chasm to hint at such a rattling, metallic environment. Lighting shafts dramatically and interacts with particularly wonderful black and white backdrop drawings by Thom Buchanan. They give charcoal suggestion of a world of dirty trains and long tunnels, for a while a boat, a huge man slowly lurching, a growing oppression of darkness... In itself, the set presents a magnificent experience.
The tall terraces of temporary seats and the steep steps, however, make for a less pleasant thrill - and a daunting challenge for the very many elderly people of matinee audiences.
The Kreutzer Sonata always was going to be a drawcard for serious theatre-lovers and for State Theatre followers. But, as the fates would have it, it became something magical and miraculous - the show for which Festival 2013 will be vividly remembered.
Samela Harris
When: Closed.
Where: State Theatre Company of South Australia – Scenic Workshop.
Bookings: Closed.
