★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. The Warehouse Theatre. 5 Mar 2025
Sauna Boy is a one man show, and it comes with warnings for strong and frequent sexual references, simulated sex scenes and coarse language, and mild nudity. Sometimes warnings seem to be overstated, but not these – they are warranted. This show is not for prudes or homophobes.
The play is about the experiences of a young man who works in a gay sauna: about the nature of his actual work, his fellow employees, his boss, the customers, and how he relates to it all. The text of the play is deliberately confronting, and the audience physically cringes at times and utters groans of revulsion.
But there is something about the frankness of the script. Written and acted by Birmingham School of Acting trained Dan Ireland-Reeves, Sauna Boy is apparently semi-autobiographical which makes it all the more confronting: some of what is described has actually happened. But which bits? Most, one suspects.
Ireland-Reeves plays the role of Dan (or Danny Boy as he is known to his boss, co-workers and customers) in a prominent (unnamed) sauna in England. He’s an out-of-work actor and needs the money, and he soon proves to his controlling boss (known as ‘Mother’ – do things his way or take the highway) that he is capable of taking on management responsibility, which he does. As manager he sets himself three targets: to get a liquor license, create a website, and make the place so popular that it frequently reaches maximum occupancy. With punishingly long hours and hard work, and with almost losing his own identity, he achieves these targets within a year but falls foul of Mother (as many do) and quits. As he leaves for the last time, so do the concerns of what comes from living a highly exaggerated and mostly insincere existence.
A highlight of the show is the variety of characters that Ireland-Reeves plays. Although they are all larger-than-life and extravagant, Ireland-Reeves breathes sufficient detail into each one to make them credible and unique. His facial gestures, accents and nuanced body language are disciplined and entertaining. Ireland-Reeves confidently moves around the very small black-box acting space with choreographed precision in such a way that it seems much larger. The lighting and sound plots are precise, empathetic with the on-stage action, well thought out and splendidly executed. Kudos to both the designer and operator!
Sauna Boy however does not land any real theatrical punches. Not that every piece of theatre needs to be ‘preachy’ or have a ‘message’, but it needs to know what it wants to be. Sauna Boy is neither a comedy nor a drama. Neither is it a melodrama, nor a musical (the script includes a Sinatra song that is sung by one of the characters). It doesn’t strive to make a noteworthy point. It is however a slice of life, one which most will never experience, but perhaps it relies to much on shock value. It does not try very hard to deeply explore the relationships between what are very complex characters, and this would be fertile territory.
That said, the audience had a great time. They laughed, reacted and engaged with Ireland-Reeves, and gave him generous applause at the end of what was certainly a taxing monologue to perform.
Kym Clayton
When: 5 to 9 Mar
Where: The Warehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. The Courtyard of Curiosities. 5 Mar 2025
Christopher Samuel Carroll is a Canberra-based Irish actor, director, and playwright, and he is a master storyteller of the first order. His theatrical training credentials are impressive: he is a graduate of The Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College, Dublin, and of École Internationale du Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris. The Canberra Critics’ Circle has described him as “the master of the solo performance” – ‘master’ is almost an understatement – and there are many one-person shows in the current Adelaide Fringe that could take a lesson from him.
The Cadaver Palaver: A Bennett Cooper Sullivan Adventure is, as the title suggests, an extraordinarily elaborate story about an audacious and intrepid (fictitious) gentleman adventurer that involves dead bodies (some of which have been dead for a very long time as it turns out!).
Carroll plays Bennett Cooper Sullivan, a Victorian gentleman, adventurer and Lothario, and for over an hour he recounts at breakneck speed a tale of dash at daring that takes him from Egypt to Edinburgh and to London’s West End. Without giving away any spoilers, it is sufficient to say that along the way he meets a range of exotic persons who both pleasure and pain him as he tries to get to unmask a mystery. Sullivan almost has fantastical powers, and he overcomes barriers in the most attention-grabbing ways. Disbelief at his antics is not just wilfully suspended, it is hung drawn and quartered! But the audience willingly goes along with it all and you can almost hear them saying to themselves “How’s he going to get out of this one?!”.
Carroll’s Lecoq training comes to the fore in the elegant and stylised way he hurls his body around the intimate acting space. Despite the rapid pace of the patter, his diction is flawless, and the text is deliciously Victorian, almost out of a Dickens novel. The piece might be criticised as being a little on the long side, but Christopher Samuel Carroll is a master of his craft, and we hang on his every word.
Kym Clayton
When: 5 to 9 Mar
Where: The Courtyard of Curiosities
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Goodwood Theatres. 5 Mar 2025
There are young people who have never heard of Charles Manson. Stephen Sewell’s new play will be a jaw-dropping revelation to them and, indeed, so far as historical reflections go, it comes as a shuddering remembrance for the oldies. This all happened during the time of the Vietnam War, a time of lies, of a perfidious Nixon, of political unrest in the USA.
It was also a time of flower power and tripping out.
Dropping acid is not a “thing” these days, but for those who might remember, playwright Stephen Sewell delivers some graphic imagery from the mind of his wild and warped protagonist, Susan Atkins, or, as renamed by Manson, Sadie Mae Glutz. She was the antithesis to flower power. Go-go girls sometimes were. She was one of the murderous Manson girls, part of “The Family”, and as a deprived teenage San Francisco stripper, she was highly vulnerable to the grotesque fantasies concocted by the charismatic musician. In her bubble of drugs and violence, she thought of him as Jesus. Nasty little brainwashed misfit. And her life, before the years of incarceration, were spent partying and adoring Manson. Oh, and committing the odd appalling murder, including that of the pregnant film star Sharon Tate.
Sewell’s Susan brags and gloats. She chills the blood. She is an unadulterated monster, gripping, fascinating and, in a dark and twisted way beneath the Sewell pen, comical, almost cartoonish. Helen O’Connor’s embodiment is superb. She plays her taut, ever high and remorseless, wild-eyed and driven. O’Connor sustains Atkins’ image as a party girl by nimbly reiterating those Go-go moves of the 60s throughout the play. This underscores a sense of the cult-brain superficiality of that cruel carnival of nasty women Manson had gathered. They blew their minds, plotted and hated while hanging out at the house of Beachboys drummer Dennis Wilson.
This compelling new Sewell work gains substance through the calibre and commitment of O’Connor who is known to many for her high-profile television career in Crownies and Packed to the Rafters.
This is an intense and intimate little psycho drama. Its pieces are sewn together with the unquestioned Sewell stage skill. He is the creator of those monumental works The Blind Giant is Dancing, Traitors, and Welcome the Bright World, along with a stream of other stage and screen works. He’s deemed among the top playwrights this country has produced.
That he should quietly bring a work to be premiered in the Goodwood Theatres on the Adelaide Fringe has surprised many. It an out-of-town run looking towards rebirth in Edinburgh. Waiting for word of mouth.
And approbation is forthcoming. It has “legs” for the rest of the world, especially considering its historic nastiness.
We’re all tired of one-handers and yet, strongly directed by Kim Hardwick with efficient production values, Partying with Manson is a wild and quirky vignette of human awfulness which definitely has what it takes to Go-Go and keep going.
Samela Harris
When: 5 to 9 Mar
Where: Goodwood Theatres
Bookings: adealaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Her Majesty’s Theatre. 4 Mar 2025
A luminary of the Cabaret Festival, Camille O’Sullivan returns to Adelaide with an extended and more weighty show in Loveletters as a full attraction for the Festival of Arts. This is perhaps a mixed blessing; the show itself is vague in places; it is rambling and unfocused and yet poignant. It is as raw as Camille’s emotions are raw. It does, I suspect, need a sharpened direction which runs counter to the notions which swim through O’Sullivan’s narrative.
The stage is dressed with animals and clothes upon clothes stands – two cats and a dog. There is a rabbit lamp on a side table, make of that what you will. O’Sullivan peers from side of stage – and pivots from behind the side curtain, almost defying herself to be in the right place and immediately begins greeting the audience with a round of profuse thanks for making it possible for her to be back in Adelaide. It is endearing and the audience sweeps her and pianist Feargal Murray (‘my oldest dearest friend’) up into the evening.
This evening is a paeon to those who are no longer with us, and she makes clear that this not just about the music, it’s about the words. Beginning with Summer In Siam, it becomes clear this is a celebration of the lives of some of her friends, principally Shane McGowan and Sinead O’Connor. When her friends died, she didn’t play their songs; she read their words. A long story of their friendship precedes Broad Majestic Shannon, and so the genesis for the show is clear. Tom Waits Martha makes an appearance, as does the slightly oddly placed Amsterdam, the Jacques Brel classic. This, I suppose, is a nod to her previous performances here as part of the Cabaret Festival, a way of ushering in some of her audience who may not have been entirely comfortable with the 2025 performance from Camille.
Her voice has a rasp, her breath can be heard pulling back into the throat, she sounds raw and emotional in places (no surprise, of course) and in places, ragged. Nick Cave’s Jubilee Street is played with a thumping swagger, evocative of Patti Smith in the way the song launches into the break. This is followed by another nod to her cabaret days of yore, Kirsty MacColl’s In These Shoes. Back in the day I recall seeing her perform this in bright red sparkling four-inch heels; tonight it is less striking silver flats.
There is an interval and a costume change. Camille wears a red jumpsuit and – initially, at least – a tan jacket. She dips back into cabaret with the heart wrenching Look Mummy, No Hands. I had to look this one up – a 1997 song from Fascinating Aida.
By now the emotion is palpable – O’Sullivan takes a detour into the world of David Bowie and thence back to Sinead O’Connor - and she is by now quite flitting from one thought to another, moving forward from the microphone to talk to her audience mid-song, scolding herself, working through what might be described as blarney. It is brave and it is honest, but is it of a standard for a Festival performance? I’m not sure, but note in passing I saw Roky Erickson perform some years ago; mesmerizing yet similarly questionable.
“I don’t wanna cry no more, so cut me down from this here tree” she intones, from Take Me To The Church from O’Connor’s final album, ‘I’m Not Bossy, I’m the Boss’. Back to Nick Cave for The Ship Song and the night could not go by without acknowledging the beauty of Leonard Cohen’s words with Anthem, where there is a crack in everything, that’s where the light gets in. One last homage to The Pogues with Rainy Night In Soho and Fairytale Of New York closes proceedings, and as a collection of Loveletters, it was perfectly enough.
Alex Wheaton
When: 4 Mar
Where: Her Majesty’s Theatre
Bookings: Closed
Adelaide Festival. Landmark Productions. Presented by Arts Projects Australia and the Adelaide Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 28 Feb 2025
Good old Beckett. One had forgotten how driftingly absurd is his existential perspective.
Krapp is his shortest play. It is ridiculously brief. Some forty-five minutes. And yet, it is an epic lifetime.
One actor performs in the dark, at a table illumined by a one-bulb light. He’s the old man Krapp revisiting his younger years in a diary tape-recorded when he was thirty-nine. It is one recording from a lifetime of tapes, just one special spool.
“Spool” becomes a key word. Not only does the old man like the sound of it, it has its own meaning in the grand unravelling of memory. He unwinds the spool and feeds it into the old-school tape machine.
We’re of a generation now who would find this cumbersome technology incredible, and, indeed, the Playhouse’s sophisticated sound system and the practicalities of high class theatre do not permit the old tape to sound the way it probably would have. It comes over loud and clear as Krapp punches at the old spool tape recorder's buttons.
He stops it and starts it. Life comes in jumps. Eventually, he puts in a new tape and speaks for himself. The present-day Krapp is more seen than heard, albeit he shambles to and fro across the stage to retrieve this or that. His sourcing bananas from an idiosyncratic locked drawer, then peeling and eating same with a slightly clownish relationship to their skins is a highlight to an audience which seems eager to laugh. Well, isn’t every audience, come to think of it. Beckett has never been funny-bunny. His characters are adrift in the somewhere nowhere of life and time. Godot never comes. Krapp is a thwarted old man scouring his past. We see him in a predicament. We invade his privacy. We dip into the chance pile of his memories, of loves lost and youthful aspiration, the counting days of his mortality.
There is so little on that black stage so eerily lit by Paul Keogan, so little time expended and yet…
Krapp’s Last Tape was written for Patrick Magee, an Irish actor of excellence and, through its years has been performed by the best, Harold Pinter, Michael Gambon, and Brian Dennehy among them. Stephen Rea stands tall among them, an Irishman with a distinguished career, here directed by Vicky Featherstone. Quite right for an Adelaide Festival. He delivers Krapp with astute physicality, a rumpled elderly presence in body and soul. And, he leaves us properly haunted and pondering the mysteries of the human predicament, again, as well we should in an Adelaide Festival.
Applause. And the rest is silence.
Samela Harris
When: 28 Feb to 3 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au