Adelaide Festival. By Michel van der Aa featuring Kate Miller-Heidke. Hetzel Lecture Theatre, Institute Building, State Library of South Australia. 27 Feb 2020
Michel van der Aa is a multi-award-winning modern composer from the Netherlands, and more…he has enhanced his operas and other work over the last twenty years with his own moving imagery. But this Australian premiere production called Eight takes the cake. Technically, it’s the cutting edge of sensory immersion utilising perfected virtual reality technology. Viscerally, it’s an unforgettable, mind-blowing, freak-out walk through the cosmos and it would be the mistake of your life not to experience it.
Eight can only be consumed one at a time. An usher helps you don wireless noise-cancelling headphones and a helmet-like contraption containing the visual VR gear. Once you’re comfortable in the darkness, a lovely reincarnation of a woman beckons you on your journey. This isn’t some elaborate 3D set-up or hologram nonsense – your senses are telling you it’s all happening yet it’s so ethereal and ghost-like. The young woman is voiced by none other than Australia’s representative at the Eurovision Song Contest 2019 in Tel Aviv, Kate Miller-Heidke. At Eurovision, she received the Marcel Bezençon award in the Artistic category for the best artist as voted by the commentators of the contest. Michel van der Aa conceived Eight expressly for her. Kate’s soaring soprano sings an enigmatic poem whose words you can study from a sheet before you go in. But wait a minute, now she’s somebody else, and where did this vast, unbelievably beautiful mountain meadow come from? That’s the pic in the program and I’m telling you nothing more.
Remember in The Matrix, when Keanu Reeves’s character, Neo, realises he can dodge the bullets – even in slow motion – but only once you truly believe the seemingly solid world of your senses is only a fabricated figment reality created by the aliens? You, too, can have that experience. And it’s exquisite.
Even after fifteen minutes of walking about after the immersion, I questioned the solidity of my surroundings with tentative steps and by touching walls. Whoa, man, that was an-other place. I think I’ll go back. Double Bravo!
PS Eight is an interactive experience in a virtual but seemingly unstable terrain. The program warns that it’s not recommended for individuals who have severe claustrophobia or epilepsy, or who experience seizures or extreme vertigo. Not listed for wheelchair access.
David Grybowski
When: 28 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: Hetzel Lecture Theatre, Institute Building, State Library of South Australia
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Bakehouse Theatre. 26 Feb 2020
There is some compelling and exquisitely performed theatre in this years’ Adelaide Fringe, and Spitfire Solo, which has played here before to rave reviews, is one of them. Do add it to your calendar!
Spitfire Solo is another production for a solo performer, and it is written and performed by Nicholas Collett. It is set across the lifetime of Peter Walker, a retired WWII pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain eighty years ago. Over fifty enthralling minutes, Collett gives us an intimate glimpse into Walker’s life, ranging from his terrifying missions in the war, meeting his wife to be, and her untimely passing, the estrangement of his daughter, his guest speaker efforts in a school, through to him meeting his granddaughter for the first time.
It is a touching story and Collett is a consummate story teller. Every word of his beautifully crafted script is brought to vivid life through a sustained and completely enchanting and disarming performance. His body language effortlessly conveys him as is a young man, as well as suggesting of the aches, pains and stiffness that comes with old age. Him miming being in a Spitfire during battle is unsettling – you almost feel the aerial manoeuvres and vicariously experience Walker’s fear and exhilaration.
The setting on the Mainstage at the Bakehouse Theatre is ideal. There is an eclectic collection of chairs, a table, and a few hand props. Everything has a purpose and is used in inventive ways to draw you into the multilayered story. Occasionally there are projections on the rear wall of old WWII film footage to add to the atmosphere and give context. Stephen Dean’s lighting is perfect, again, and goes to prove that even minimalistic effects that are expertly designed and executed are capable of great impact.
The script plays out across a number of time periods, moving seamlessly back and forwards between them. This is not an uncommon theatrical device, but it rarely works as well as it does in this superlative production.
Nicholas Collett’s Spitfire Solo is worthy of your time. Do experience it yourself. You will love it.
Kym Clayton
When: 26 Feb to 7 Mar
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Red Phoenix Theatre. Holden Street Theatres, The Arch. 26 Feb 2020
For the first time, Holden Street’s celebrated, award-winning resident theatre company has joined in to the venue’s wild and varied Fringe program lineup. But what an odd offering.
The King is a short play (or long skit) about what happens when a hen-pecked husband succumbs to a high-pressure sell. It is written by respected Texas-born Adelaide playwright Jimmy Lyons in American idiom but performed with Australian accents. Hence, many funny lines flounder in a cultural wilderness. Red Phoenix seems to have an issue with American accents. It eschewed the southern drawl in American playwright Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate and now, in this exercise on the crass American hard sell, it has done it again, this time under Adrian Barnes’ direction.
Perchance, the script could be Australianised and the “grill” become a barbie. Then again, the salesman’s tenacious pushiness may need changing. Of the three characters in the play, ironically enough, he seems to be the most complex and interesting. He is the absolute, tragic, desperation bottom line of Willy Lomans, a salesman who will sink to any depth to make a sale. He is fearlessly embodied by Michael Eustice, who creates a soul so persistently obnoxious that one wants to run for cover. Fortunately, his customer is a complete dolt and a very uninteresting man and he takes the bait. He is a pussy-whipped loser. One is surprised that any self-respecting career woman would be married to him. But, she’s an ugly unfulfilled character. He’s an ugly unfulfilled character. Their relationship is a crude passe #metoo battle of the sexes. One does not want to know about their sex life.
So maybe the accent is not the thing, the play’s the thing.
One is left admiring the valiant Red Phoenix cast of Eustice, Nigel Tripodi and Sharon Malujlo. They’re three terrific actors, troupers through and through, and they each deserve a star.
Samela Harris
When: 26 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Holden Street Theatres. 26 Feb 2020
Among existential questions to ponder: how does it feel in the skin of another? Franz Kafka dwelt on this unknowable in The Metamorphosis when man became insect and then stepped up to the hypothetical of beast becoming man. He wrote this contemplation as an address to the scientific community from an ape who had made the transition - and not by choice.
It’s a gruelling and heart-rending story brought into the Holden Street Fringe program by South African actor, Tony B. Miyambo, in a piece adapted and directed by Phala O. Phala.
This work has been collecting acclaim and awards wherever it has been and the story is not going to change here. It is a breathtaking virtuoso piece of theatre, exhausting to watch.
Miyambo, in loose, haphazardly ill-fitting clothes, embodies the ape, Red Peter, with impeccable physicality, from the simian lope to the awkward biped elevations as the hapless creature takes to the human lectern. Miyambo is the ape man, snorting and straining against the confines of his predicament. His transition is caused by his capture and imprisonment, cruelly confined in a cage on a Europe-bound ship. Miyambo’s expressions of his agony and despair sear through the audience, raw and terrible. He explains, in his hoarsely gutteral voice, that he seeks not to emulate man in order to be like man but as the only option he can see to escape incarceration.
The audience is left both dumbfounded and in awe at the end of this hour of theatre. It has been a mighty trip into a hideous hypothetical. It has been a display of masterful acting, It has been a graphic lesson in humanity and an unforgettable experience.
Samela Harris
When: 26 Feb to 15 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Musical Rebirth Of A Silent Film Legend. Mercury Cinema. 26 Feb 2020
The Adelaide Fringe throws up some curious events at times, and this is one of them. If you are into silent films and particularly the art of musical accompaniment for them, then this show is for you.
Historically, films from the silent era (1890s-1920s) were accompanied by live music to assist the audience to better understand and reinforce the emotions portrayed by the actors and to better appreciate the context of each scene itself. Musical accompaniment in picture theatres was usually provided by a pianist or an organist, and the music itself was often improvised, perhaps with a basic ‘programme’ devised by the accompanist or, especially when the films became longer, by the movie studio itself. For longer films excerpts from stock classical music or theatrical repertory music was played.
For this event internationally well-known Australian pianist and composer Ashley Hribar accompanies the 1920 German silent horror film The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. In its day the film became a global hit, and its influence has continued to be felt for a century. David Bowie loved the film and used the design of the film’s bizzare Dali-esque sets to style his North American tour in 1974 and to promote his Diamond Dogs album (think Rebel Rebel). Johnny Depp’s make-up in Tim Burton’s 1990 film Edward Scissorhands was based on the look of Cesare, the unwitting somnambulistic murderer in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.
The storyline of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari follows the disturbed experiments of hypnotist Dr. Caligari to discover whether a chronic sleep walker (Cesare) can somehow be influenced to commit murders. But the film has a big twist in the end, and the thesis that Caligari is the insane is turned on its head.
Everything in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is distorted and surrealist: the almost psychedelic and geometrically confused set; the extreme and excessive make-up and the equally extreme facial gestures by actors; and the almost manic nature of the lead characters.
With nothing in the film as it seems, Hribar has fertile territory against which to provide a musical accompaniment, and he comes up trumps. His accompaniment is performed on an amplified acoustic piano, a Moog DFAM drum machine, some physical items such as bells, shakers and brushes, a synthesiser, and recorded sounds. The sound palette is extensive, and richly varied, and it enhances the film. There is as much interest in watching Hribar, who wore Edward Scissorhands style makeup, as there is in the film itself. Hribar demonstrates that he is a classy and talented pianist, proving the merits of a thorough classical training. His improvisations are at times perfectly matched to the kinetics of the film, showing the precision and analysis demonstrated by a Foley artist. He employs a variety of musical styles, ranging from jazz inflected carefree passages, through to extravagant arpeggio flourishes in the style of Liszt and Chopin, to modern idioms.
Hribar is oh so impressive, and the film truly comes to life for a modern audience. This is a gem of a show and is recommended.
Kym Clayton
When: 26 to 28 Feb
Where: Mercury Cinema
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au