Adelaide Festival. Windmill Theatre Company and Sandpit. Queen’s Theatre. 8 Mar 2023
I love young persons’ theatre, especially by Windmill. It’s always highly creative and it messages without pretension or angst – ie. it’s fun! You listen to the kids and the kids will listen to you.
This extraordinary production began as a thought bubble of Rosemary Myers, longtime creative leader at Windmill. She handballed it to playwright Lally Katz who roped in director Clare Watson. It got shaped through an iterative workshopping process, much of it with the cast. Easy peasy!
The original Hansel and Gretel is a Brothers Grimm tale of 1812, and grim it is. Many of the key features of the fable are present in Windmill’s version, but most are transmogrified.
This production contains everything titillating for school kids and is loaded with issues. The first gasp goes to Jonathon Oxlade’s incredible set comprising a gabled house with bespoke opaque or transparent walls on demand. The whole shebang rotates to hide or reveal whatever is necessary. We are introduced to a family comprising a Mum who doesn’t understand her daughter, a daughter looking forward to the formal with her bestie (she hopes for more than bestie actually), a younger brother (did he have a moustache?) and a Dad who tries to claw back some machismo command from a situation going pear-shaped.
Unlike most fictional families – Death of a Salesman or Long Day’s Journey Into Night comes to mind – this one sensibly opts for group therapy and thus we meet the most remarkable character. Gareth Davies plays a psycho-charlatan with aplomb. His conman of the subconscious is garbed like a guru and gabbles like Tony Robbins. Employing song, dance and performance skills, Davies concocts some absolutely magnetic wizardry.
There is nothing but other great performances and choreographic energy. The arrow of the narrative arc belongs to the adolescent female played by Temeka Lawlor with believable naturalism. The parents worked out by Jo Stone and Jim Smith are more purposefully cartoonish and their parents’ foibles are funny. The Hans character (Dylan Miller) is a great observer of and foil to the angst-driven daughter, and bestie Sim played by Emily Liu, well, what happened to her? The wolf people and the outside-the-gate idea were interesting threats but didn’t actually nudge the story much. And Grandpa is a wolf? Wonderfully whacky but useless.
Nothing is off the table here: drugs, sexual freedom, weirdness. The energy explodes into a climatic reveal of sci-fi horror rendered superbly by set design and frantic action. A nifty device is that the audience is issued with sound devices and earphones. A voice acts as narrator or subconscious, but it wasn’t used enough for either to be truly participatory. There is a short quiz before the show so that manipulative powers off stage can issue instructions to individuals about how they’ll participate in the performance. This was utterly fascinating.
A production not to be missed but you will miss it unless you are already booked. Every school in the world is going. Bravo!
David Grybowski
When: 3 to 12 Mar
Where: Queen’s Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Powersuit Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 7 Mar 2023
This is a cracker of a play and performance! Because the revelation of information is so exquisitely written - so subtly moving under the radar of action - you may want the same experience I had by approaching it with little foreknowledge.
Safe to say housemates – a vivacious young woman and witty homosexual – are cosily comfortable in their flat, which takes on a kind of Covid self-isolation. Their portals to their surrounding urban universe are via their regular podcast to an army of followers and the occasional foray to work and dating entanglements. They cuddle and converse like never-ending friendship. Everything is OK until something goes wrong and the characters are profoundly tested.
Playwright Laura Jackson is highly credentialed and experienced. Most of her creativity focusses on women’s experiences with street harassment, domestic violence (ie: not safe anywhere), online privacy and fertility. Jackson notes that The Culture was first written in 2014 but is now tweaked for today, and things are only worse since Rosie Batty was Australian of the Year.
Laura Jackson has written a completely modern play that mirrors urbanites aged 20s or so with complete veracity – a complex milieu of connection and trepidation. Jackson also plays the young female with effervescent exuberance, a-teeter between confidence and fragility. Mina Asfour is a theatre creative working out of Western Sydney. His performance is like none at all – so realistic and natural. Together, their characters’ friendship, loyalty and spats make for an easy verisimilitude.
The original production was directed in New York by Bethany Caputo and made ready for the current tour by Carly Fisher. The detail in the direction fosters the pace and the poignancy. A screen showing phone texts and podcasts is extremely useful.
There is a message about domestic violence but the narrative focusses on the damage and the response, not on the perpetrator, and we cheer our dynamic duo for making good decisions.
A terrific tale told with delectable realism. Bravo!
P.S. The Robson Jackson Foundation supports a charity in each city of their tour; in Adelaide, it is the Western Adelaide Domestic Violence Service (part of Women’s Safety Services SA). The foundation will match donations of up to $2000 in each city - $10,000 in total. Get onto it.
David Grybowski
When: 7 to 16 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres – The Arch
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★
Adelaide Fringe. Lisa Angove. Star Theatres. 6 Mar 2023
The program opines that the Irish playwright and novelist, Samuel Beckett, is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th Century. While he obviously was an important writer and the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1969, there are few who have gone inside people’s heads in theatre the way Beckett has.
Footfalls is grim viewing. The action is minimalist: a middle-aged woman in decrepit condition simply paces across the front of the stage dressed in a ragged and worn dressing gown, or worse. Occasionally she stops to converse with an older voice that we identity at that of her mother.
Lisa Angove’s woman is a study of pitiable pain and confusion. But she never changes it up to signal the distinct parts of the play as outlined by Beckett. Her grimaces are awesome but tiresome. Angove too often attacks the lines with screeches and loses fidelity. Some of the staging elements evoking symbolic representations of Beckett’s themes are awol, so the show is even more minimalist than even Beckett imagined. The Beckett estate has been known to close down reprises that don’t obey the stage notes with precision, so how did they get away with that?
The direction by Phil Roberts is derived from Ralph Wilson’s direction in some way. Even the program notes are Wilson’s. The mother’s voice – Joyce Glynn – is recorded on scratchy old media and irritating pauses occur betwixt the live and recorded components. Her intonation is the ticket.
If you don’t know Beckett, this production might scare you off forever. But you’ll have fun figuring out what the heck is going on.
David Grybowski
When: 6 to 10 Mar
Where: Star Theatres – Star Theatre Two
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Casey Jay Andrews and Joanne Hartstone. 5 Mar 2023
The title promises something spooky or sinister. Prior to the performance, writer and actor Casey Jay Andrews explains to the audience the basics of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse found in the Book of Revelations, but it’s drawing a long bow to link either of these to her more tame narrative.
Casey is an accomplished and clear raconteur and ideally suited to tell her tale. She writes with the familiar device of simultaneously advancing disparate anecdotes that blossom into stories and you guess the connection. The stories are familiar and warm-hearted but what little that is dramatically at stake for the protagonists is tempered by humour at the fancy of their actions. Casey’s enthusiasm thus seems over-egged and it’s all very cute. They say it’s best to write what you know; all the principal characters are female, even the horse, and the few males are not very nice. The ending is tied together like a parcel and presented to you as a gift.
And by the way, horses aren’t saddled up in their stalls waiting for someone to steal them.
David Grybowski
When: 2 to 12 Mar
Where: Treasury 1860 - Courtyard
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Cirkidz. The Peacock @ Gluttony. 5 Mar 2023
Wow. Just wow. This is Cirkidz?
They were good in previous productions, for instance last Fringe’s offering Ropeable, but this is next level. Cirkidz is not just speaking up; it’s speaking a whole new language. It’s a harder, sharper language, working on that nebulous area between the body and the brain. The conversation is big, bold and at times brassy. It’s vulnerable, and it’s questioning.
Mettle is a new circus show and apparently “explores the mental toughness and passion that propels you toward achieving your vision for life”.
I’m never sure about these vague descriptions of shows – if you didn’t see them written down you would be clueless half the time, and just enjoy the production for the visual performances. Because there is certainly plenty of that!
But this time, there is a spoken narrative. It comes after you’ve settled down a bit, after you’ve noted that this is a step beyond what you’ve seen them do before. It all starts to shift shape a little, to make its own sense, to cement your suspicion that you’re seeing something special. The body and the brain. The connections. The disconnections. The pain. The passion. The laughter. The despair.
The ensemble work is exemplary. While there are some standout performers, there are no stars. The troupe work together, each forming part of the whole – there are no passengers here. And the athleticism is remarkable. They have honed their craft; movements are not left to dangle in the air or slide to a slow stop, they are sharp, clean, precise. Feet and arms stop when and where they should, incising the space before moving on.
Mettle also notes “that if you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, you will light that sucker up yourself”. The light is used as motif for a number of the vignettes and the strength of these performers’ - body and brain – just shines through.
There’s plenty of humour to be had here as well – the ‘don’t touch the sweets’ routine is both hilarious and impressive, as the artists contort those bodies under and over themselves. Musical skills are also on show, as some of the cast take to the bass, keyboard and percussion for a beautifully performed vocal piece.
There is so much more to be said here – the seesaw routine is exciting, thrilling and unmissable. Towers of chairs have you holding your breath, and red cotton string will have you chuckling.
One often hears young people described as the performers (or audience) of the future. Forget that. These are the performers of now. They’re match fit, and the show is exemplary. Congratulations Cirkidz. With reference to another of the amazing routines, you’ve nailed it!
Arna Eyers-White
When: 13 Mar
Where: The Peacock at Gluttony
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au