The Adelaide Repertory Theatre. Arts Theatre. 16 Jun 2022
MGM has nothing on the cast of thousands involved in this Alan Bennett history drama.
The stage of The Arts is a spectacle of red coats, insignia, and period wigs. There are, indeed, Whigs in wigs and also Tories. Not to mention a king and queen and assorted attendants, valets, and doctors. The costuming of the show is an achievement in itself and the backstage must be swarming with dressers whisking the actors through their changes.
As the title suggests, this play tells about the mental illness of George III with a complaint known as porphyria but latterly suspected to be bipolar disorder. As playwright Alan Bennett diagnoses the King for this partly-fictionalised play, it was the former ailment which is accompanied by a diversity of difficult symptoms such as fevers and chills, chest pains, constipation, itches, and purple urine.
With his signature comedic touch, Bennett has the poor King attended by a group of specialist doctors who plague him with torturous treatments. It is gently light relief and, indeed, there are a few laughs in assorted characterisations and quips. But mental illness itself is miserable and, as George III, Lindsay Dunn takes the audience into some dark and desperate places. In something of a bravura performance, Dunn takes the hapless king from blithe pukka authority through a decline of utter verbosity and irrationality and into a wilderness of escaped reality. It is a wild and cumbersome script, a huge ask of an actor, and Dunn’s mastery of it is truly impressive.
Around him is a royal court trying to stay out of disarray, a loyal German queen, and a loathed decadent oldest son who is being thrust towards the position of Regent by the strategising politicians of the day. The action zaps from royal household to bellowing parliament to doctors and, the king, the king, the king.
Actors carry added masks to create the full-scale rabble of Parliament and, under the direction of Angela Short, they sound all too familiar. Fashions may change but political shenanigans remain ever pushy, pithy, and pungent.
Short has rounded up some of Adelaide’s finest in the support line-up and they seem to be having a very good time on stage with their wigs and period costumes, poses and pretentions. There’re about forty in the cast all told. Kate Anolak is particularly endearing as the German queen with Rebecca Kemp an agreeable power beside her. They get the best frocks, too.
Tom Tassone is farcically foppish as the self-indulgent Prince of Wales while, in a role with very few words, Jamie Wright holds his own beside him with a deliciously bemused reactive characterisation of the Duke of York. It is hard to take one’s eyes off him. Meanwhile, Joshua Coldwell, Peter Davies and Anthony Vawser make a merry meal of the assorted quacks with their blistering and bleeding and stools and rising gout. Leighton Vogt and Steve Marvanek offer portrayals of wiley politics, Jack Robins also with Maxwell Whigham right in there and, well, a mass of exquisitely competent women fulfilling myriad male roles: Jenny Allen, Leah Lowe, Rose Harvey, Heather Riley, Lucy Johnson, Chelsea Lancione among them with Jenny Allard partnering wittily with Rose Vallen as the pushy political provincials.
The set is simple but eminently regal - a stage divided into three sections, two with red velvet curtains opening onto the households of the king and the regent and a central raised orange curtain for affairs of state. The king and queen roll in and out on a mighty royal bedstead. Doctors scamper about with chamber pots. A chambermaid flourishes a bed-warmer. Desks come and go as does the cruel chair of unseated power. Magnificent snatches of Handel punctuate the scenes; King George’s favourite composer don’t you know, what-what, and oh so regal and beautiful it is. Just the icing on a lavish period cake.
Samela Harris
When: 16 to 22 Jun
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: adelaiderep.com or 8212 5777
Adelaide Cabaret Festival. Spiegeltent. 11 Jun 2022
This is the oddest out-there show in the CabFest.
It is a not-show show.
It is a DIY art class.
And isn’t it lovely there in the Spiegeltent, comfortably warm on a cold winter’s day? Surrounded by charming Festival attendants.
Musicians play wallpaper jazz as we would-bes take our seats in a semi-circle.
The stage is adorned by a chaise longue, a piano, a pot of fern, a lamp, and a bentwood chair.
It’s a lovely setting.
Everyone gets a board, paper, a pencil, and a piece of charcoal and then most agreeable artist, Ruby Chew, encourages the would-be artists to sketch the very lovely Burlesque Queen Letitia Stitch.
Ruby does not want to push the free flow of her students. She advises more than demonstrates. She makes it just a bit harder as we go along. Single-line. Opposite hand. Heavens above, one works better with the wrong hand. Which says a lot about the aptitude of the student. People compare works. They are pretty dire. Laughs.
Our gorgeous model changes pose. Oh, my, doesn’t she have a good haircut. Lovely linear body in slimline white ruffled dress. Drawn thrice now from the rear. Hmm.
Cabaret artiste Rosie Russell comes along and adds some creamy vocals.
And the band plays on.
And, if one is proud of one’s work, there’s a can of fixative to spray on the charcoal before one leaves.
Maybe someone discovered unknown aptitude.
Some of us will keep the day job.
Samela Harris
When: 12 and 25 Jun
Where: The Spiegeltent
Bookings: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au
Adelaide Cabaret Festoval. Space Theatre. 11 Jun 2022
Turning back the clock to the good-old, bad-old days which were just like these days.
The 1930s had been an era post- plague, featuring the Great Depression and the rise of Naziism.
So, in a perchance sleazy night club, not very co-incidentally named the "Corona Club", the entertainers entertain in what seems to be a romantic reunion.
The entertainers are embodied by the fabulous Phil Scott with Catherine Alcorn, who makes up for Phil’s sleek pate with a couple of wild wigs and even a striking Statue of Liberty spiked tiara. Not that the American Speakeasy theme oppressed. It was set in Kings Cross with lots of references to Queanbeyan.
The patter between the two entertainers is a litany of groan jokes, not the fierce wit one expects of Scott, but a very different theme. One could barely expect two sentimental old has-beens to be on the current topical zeitgeist. That is not this show.
The big drama here is the expectation of a police raid for illicit drinking. It’s the 1930s, don’t forget.
Alcorn does some physical comedic shtick, downing the champers and falling off the chaise. She belts out big numbers and works the front row for a bit of audience participation.
Scott, meanwhile, does his peerless twinkle-fingers on the piano in both serious and amusing contexts.
And it is Scott who steals the show with two mighty numbers: movingly, Brother Can You Spare a Dime; and, oh, wild cheering applause, resoundingly Fats Waller’s heavenly glorious Your Feets Too Big.
The band, set on a nice mezzanine, is a joy. Rob Chenoweth is blow-away brilliant on the trumpet, Thomas Waller natty on the drums and Oscar Peterson (yes his real name) on bass.
There was a spot of grief with the sound on Saturday night. It felt-over-amped and gave a rough edge to the timbre of the voices.
And, oh so disappointingly, the Cabaret Festival did not see fit to set The Space in cabaret configuration for this cabaret show. Why? There were just some mysteriously VIP tables right in front of the stage with the rest of the audience perched in bleacher formation.
The old days of CabFest winter champagne cheer are gone, it seems.
The bubbly is outside in the cold, if you want it.
Samela Harris
When: 10 to 12 Jun.
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au
CRAM Collective. Rumpus. 3 Jun 2022
Something Big is an intensely sophisticated piece. Anna Barnes has written a play comprising the shattered remains of what was a whole and unified friendship between three people. Thomas, Pia and Julia; absent a fourth friend, Geoff.
Thomas (Aarod Vawser), Pia (Ren Williams) and Julia (Melissa Pullinger) desperately re-enact the last time they dined together with this Geoff, sharing and commentating on this event in direct address to the audience. We are involuntary conscripts, observing some really personal stuff. Personal stuff these friends want erased from history.
Shards of memory, relationships, friendships, fears, and insecurities are played out in a powerfully effective, highly stylised form of taut, high-speed black comedy blended with a very low, yet obvious, dash of game show chutzpah.
Intertwined with this is the memory of an horrific plane crash which played a part in the problem being rebooted before our eyes.
Why do they need to? By show’s end we know. We are shocked.
Director Connor Reidy, with great finesse, produces a production spinning and swirling around the empty space in the room unseen, yet heard. The ensemble are three wickedly on point actors employing a solid dose of disciplined crazy; brave in performance.
The empty space in the room, Geoff, a bleak hole of absence the whole production spins around makes Something Big so powerful, mesmerising, hilariously dark and traumatic, thrown at (and through!) the audience via the arrow-sharp triangular thrust.
Reidy’s, granular exposition of Barnes text is powerfully aided by Tom Kitney’s lighting, sound and video design, in union with Kathryn Sproul’s subtle, apparently naturalistic, living room set. It becomes something far more other worldly and abstract overlaid with Kitney’s eerie series of projections, glass-breaking sound effects and flashing lights.
The CRAM Collective’s debut is an epic, utterly gripping and enthralling experience.
David O’Brien
When: 2 to 12 Jun
Where: Rumpus 100 Sixth Street Bowden
Bookings: trybooking.com
Windmill Theatre Co. Dunstan Playhouse. 28 May 2022
Don’t get invested in the title of this production; the story is used as a vehicle and to be honest, bears little reference to the original fairy tale. Here the stepsisters don’t treat (Cinde)Rella like a servant, stepmother is really quite lovely, the whole family is very close and respectful of each other.
Having got that out of the way, the narrative follows the singing trio of sisters and their manager mum. The haunting opening, evoking the sirens or spirit guides of myth or legend, gives way to a full on, contemporary production, as the sisters’ audition for ‘Is This Talent’. No explanation is required for how this works (and how sad is that?); Rella (Carla Lippis), Afa (Fez Faanana) and Sika (Thomas Fonua) strut their way across the stage in a rollicking performance that wins approval from the judges. For one of them anyway. In a rather didactic fashion, the judges make clear they don’t want ‘the ugly ones’; Rella reluctantly leaves her sisters and goes to forge a career with Prince Charming Records.
The search for identity is spurred as mum (Elaine Crombie) confesses that all the children are adopted. While she is a First Nations woman, Afa and Sika are Samoan and Rella (so named after being found under an umbrella) is Italian. And so begins a fascinating journey for all, told with humour and pathos, and no small amount of soul searching. That Afa and Sika are played by drag queens plays perfectly into the Samoan culture of the Fa’afafine, Samoa’s third gender.
The cast work well together, taking up some dual minor roles, with Crombie’s turn as a club bouncer a highlight. There are moments of great comedy, accentuated by drag humour and generational jokes about the use of social media. Fairy tales get a bit mangled as the ‘mirror, mirror’ enters the fray, adding to the beauty/not beauty narrative, and the fatuity of physical vanity.
This being a premiere, the production still needs a bit of tightening, and this most shows in the focus of the message. It can be a little disjointed, and sometimes misses the target audience. It may be there are simply too many inputs into the show and it becomes a case of too many ideas. Having said that, this is a brilliant reassurance to teens of the commonality and normalising of difference in its many forms.
Faanana and Fonua are both credited as co-creators of the show, alongside Windmill’s Associate Director Sasha Zahra and playwright Tracey Rigney. Their experience as dancers comes to the fore with some very cool choreography, culminating in an outstanding Samoan dance in full costume. Chris Petridis’s lighting design reflects the hipness of the production, but it should be noted that some of the placement is very ‘in your eyes’.
As in all good tales, there is a happy ending with the distraught Rella being found again under her umbrella, and the de rigueur big finale. Much of this will go straight to the teenage heart; well done Windmill, on tackling a difficult subject in a language they can understand.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 28 May to 4 June
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: ticketek.com.au
Recommended for ages 12+