State Theatre Company of SA. Dunstan Playhouse. 24 Aug 2019
Ailsa Paterson’s set for State Theatre’s Jasper Jones production is a work of supreme and beautiful art. If theatre design was included in our fabulous SALA festival, it could be heralded as a star turn.
It depicts a magnificence of paperbark trees in a vast and towering forest. It is arboreally imaginative, theatrically mind-blowing, and superbly illuminated through the moods of day and night by the exquisite lighting of Nigel Levings.
What a pair. What an achievement. What a visual joy.
It is clearly the secret to the success of this production of Kate Mulvaney’s adaptation of the beloved Craig Silvey novella.
As director, Natasha Jelk has chosen to give the play a sense of heightened artifice with stilted, unnatural deliveries out there in the woodland wilds. She has assembled an interesting cast with James Smith wide-eyed and strident with geeky urgency as the principal character, Charlie. He works with zeal and emotional commitment slithering in and out of the cleverly-designed louvre windowed sleep-out of his home and carrying with him a thundering overload of fear and guilt. He relates well to Rachel Burke as his bookish true love, Eliza, and she to him. And Burke absolutely shines in her denouement scene, revealing the fate of her sister which along with racism is the pivotal issue of the story. Elijah Valadian-Wilson plays the part-Aboriginal boy, Jasper Jones, who is a frequent and hapless victim of blame in a nasty, judgemental Australian country town. Valadian-Wilson’s performance is hallmarked by the lithe beauty of his deportment. He streams through the trees and up the rock faces like a graceful zephyr. Roy Phung is the opposite in the role of Jeffrey, the Vietnamese schoolboy with a passion for cricket and watermelon. His is a lovely comic characterisation. Emma Beech and Rory Walker fill in the cast in multiple roles, both accomplished, albeit Walker’s dynamism in a revelatory scene as Mad Jack is probably the production’s true dramatic show-stopper.
It is quite a long and languid production leaving audience members at times a little restless. But, oh, its over-arching aesthetic is a rare pleasure to behold.
Samela Harris
When: 24 Aug to 7 Sep
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
Red Phoenix Theatre. Holden Street Theatres. 23 Aug 2019
Predatory descendants and an elderly matriarch hanging on to control of her estate; it’s an old, ugly story which resonates through affluent cultures.
In this case, it is a Texas family and the year is 1987. Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright Horton Foote, notably screenwriter of To Kill a Mockingbird, was indeed a Texan and the play is strongly imbued in localised Americana; the old black family retainer, the grand old dynastic coastal cotton plantation and the generational choices between oil and agriculture. In this play, the ugly spectre of oil is proffered as perhaps the only salvation to the family’s declining fortunes. Real estate values are slumping and a tax bill hangs over the property.
The family has gathered for a dinner at the grand old home where easy-going Louise and her estate-managing son, just known as Son, have stayed close to the proud old matriarch, Stella. Like circling vultures, Louise's alcoholic brother Lewis, desperate with gambling debts, and their sister Mary Jo whose husband, Bob, is in financial difficulty, are ravenous for a share of the estate. And thus, does the family interact over a disastrous dinner in which the geriatric family retainer, Doug, also is facing the ambitions of the younger generation.
The script is rich in the atmosphere of America’s Deep South and peppered with brittle barbs about avarice and influence. From time to time it is sharply humorous. Few of the characters are particularly likeable and it is the most loathsome of them all, Mary Jo, who dominates the action with her bitchy assertions of impatient entitlement. In this role, Cate Rogers absolutely steals the show with panoply of spiteful, self-righteous and competitive expressions. She brings awfulness to an entertaining art form.
Lyn Wilson plays the less abrasive sister. She’s a good actress and it is a pleasing characterisation. The redoubtable Jean Walker wears the role of the aging matriarch with grace and authority while, as her trusted grandson, Son, Mark Mulders establishes and sustains the family’s one thread of sanity with a strong and compassion-driven performance. It is quite the contrast to the emotional roller coaster Brendan Cooney delivers as the feckless gambling son, not to mention the interesting shadow of deviousness generated by Lindsay Dunn as the son-in-law.
In all, director Libby Drake has chosen a very interesting cast of capable actors for this Red Phoenix production. The one incongruous thing she has chosen is to eschew American accents in the belief that this makes the play easier for Australian audiences to relate to. While one may be a bit tired of hearing American accents on the Adelaide stage, in this case a great deal of the rhythm, idiom, humour and cultural innuendo of the play suffers. Wayne Anthoney’s heart-rending performance as the old family retainer is compromised by the fact that his accent cannot iterate the music written into his wonderful old character's words.
The audience has to use its imagination and leap-frog into the idea that Australia has generations of loyal house servants. On which subject, both Kate Anolak and Gabi Douglas are eminently appealing in their roles as the cook and the maid. Also delightful in this large cast is Laura Antoniazzi as Son’s sensible girlfriend. Then there're Nicole Walker and Jasmine Leach ever scowling and primping as the heartless spoiled-brat granddaughters and Eliza Brampton as the garrulous teenage waitress who symbolises the inevitable future of divided estates.
Kate Prescott’s living and dining room set is eminently workable and aesthetic and full marks to the props team for the hot meal.
Director Libby Drake has put up a good defence in the program for her choice to play the production in Australian accents but, to this critic, it seems just a bit unfair on a Texan playwright’s piece of highly idiosyncratic Texas Americana.
That said, the audience enjoyed the show and left the theatre singing praises to its fabulous cast.
Samela Harris
When: 23 to 31 Aug
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: holdenstreettheatres.com
Therry Dramatic Society. Arts Theatre. 14 Aug 2019
One has to love Therry for keeping alive the quirky traditionalism of J.B. Priestly.
An Inspector Calls is still something of a drawcard for the older audience demographic and it is a very good vehicle for a younger brood of actors. It is a famously lateral piece of police-investigation theatre, a 70-year-old breakaway from conventional whodunnits with a strong socialist edge. It is a morality play laced with interrogation and guilt.
Angela Short has directed this production in an appropriately proper, upper-crust British spirit. The Birlings are smugly affluent and upwardly mobile thanks to the ruthless underpayment of workers in their factory. They are celebrating the engagement of their daughter to a very nice chap whose parents might see the Birlings as a bit lower on the social scale. The play opens with the Birling family exquisitely dressed for their party. The champagne is flowing along with the booming braggadocio of the father, Arthur.
Don Oswald’s set design features some very tasteful antique furniture but incorporates an extremely heavy-handed piece of symbolism in the form of gaping black chasms and cracks in the walls of the house.
In all, however, it is a very solid production.
The cast uniformly is accomplished, each at home in their characters. Lani Gerbi, in particular, shines as the strong-willed and open-minded daughter, Sheila. Matthew Chapman complements very nicely as her suitor, Gerald Croft while Dylan O’Donnell gives a persuasive performance as the Birling's dissolute young son Eric. He’s particularly on-the-ball when he has an emotional rant mimicking his father who, forcefully played by Patrick Clements, has an exceptionally gravelly delivery. Meanwhile, Rebecca Kemp is elegantly restrained and self-satisfied as the mother, Sybil. The Inspector is embodied by Mark Drury and oh, how sonorous and portentous he is.
There is some strange stage direction from Short, sometimes just too arch and stylised. There is an odd, brief blackout in the first act. But, in all, it is grand old play well put together and well worth seeing.
Samela Harris
When: 14 to 24 Aug
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
State Opera of South Australia. Adelaide Town Hall. 9 Aug 2019
If audience reaction is the yard stick, then Girls’ Night Out is Adelaide’s ‘classical music’ concert event of the year, and sadly it was a once-off. If you missed it, you missed an aural feast that highlighted the majesty of the human voice in all its magnificence.
Billed Girl’s Night Out, the program is homage to the music of Richard Strauss and features ten arias for female voices and five orchestral pieces from Strauss’ operas and lieder. The stage of the Adelaide Town Hall was enlarged to cater for an expanded Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (with two harps, enlarged percussion, grand piano, celeste and harmonium), four Australian divas each with enviable international experience and reputations, as well as conductor Simone Young who is a force of nature in her own right. Like an alignment of the planets, these five magnificent women combine musical forces to produce something that is greater than the sum of the parts. Their impact is almost too much: their passion and musicality is all consuming and joyous.
From the very first notes of Fröhlicher Beschluss from the opera Intermezzo, Simone Young AM demonstrates why she is one of the world’s leading conductors. Under her direction the Adelaide Symphony brings forth the piece’s full palette of musical colours with clarity and immediacy, and there is no let up for the rest of the concert. The standard is high, very high indeed. And there is a palpable sense of joy and excitement. It is exhilarating to watch Young stride onto the stage at the beginning of the second half of the program and start conducting before she even mounts the podium, and the orchestra doesn’t miss a beat even while the audience is still applauding Young’s return to the stage!
Adrian Uren’s performance (and later Sarah Barrett) on horn is a stand out, again and again, which is a good thing because Strauss was a horn player himself and unsurprisingly the horn features prominently in his orchestrations. Dean Newcomb on clarinet is superlative in Träumerei am Kamin, also from Intermezzo. Concertmaster Natsuko Yoshimoto on violin is tenderness personified in her accompaniment in the lieder Morgen!
But the evening belongs to the four singers: mezzo soprano Catherine Carby, soprano Miriam Gordon-Smith, soprano Emma Matthews, and soprano Lisa Gasteen AO who is another force of nature.
Gordon-Stewart and Matthews joined forces for the duet Er ist der Richtigfe nicht fur mich! Aber der Richtige from Arabella. One either side of the stage separated by Young between them, there was an early (but brief) synchronisation problem but Young skilfully and quickly brought them together allowing the sheer beauty and power of their voices to rise above the orchestra and completely seduce the audience.
The song Allerseelen is intricately layered and is a superb example of the instruments in the orchestra ‘singing’ in duet with the vocalist. Young allowed the conversations, particularly between Carby and the celeste and horn, to surface quickly, clearly and confidently. Carby’s performance of Sein wir wieder gut from Ariadne auf Naxos is a highlight and she amply demonstrates her well-honed acting skills to give immediacy to the tension and drama of the piece. Similarly, Gordon-Stewart is at her stunning best in Es gibt ein Reich also from Ariadne. She embodies the despair and deep sadness of the piece in a very touching and affecting performance.
Gasteen is one of the best sopranos around. She is an irresistible force to which even the most demanding arias must succumb. A Wagnerian specialist, Gasteen’s performances of the songs Cäcilie and Die Nacht from Opp 27 and 10 respectively were breathtaking. Her expansive voice is as true in the softest moments as it is during extended crescendo. She finds an appealing but unusual joy in the ambiguous melancholy of Die Nacht. In the song Befriet she again demonstrates purity of tone in the quietest of moments and allows her majestic vibrato and superb breath control to carry her imperiously towards the forte conclusions. But perhaps the highlight of the evening is her rendition of the hauntingly beautiful Zueignung in which she reveals a consummate command of both the text and the music. Throughout, Young is clearly Gasteen’s kindred spirit and her muse.
The concert rounds out with Matthews and Carby giving an impassioned rendition of Mir ist die Ehre widerfahren from Der Rosenkavalier, then joined by Gordon Stewart for an emotion charged performance of Hab’ mir’s gelobt also from Der Rosenkavalier.
It certainly is a girl’s night out but the boys thoroughly enjoyed it as well!
This concert is a highlight of the current concert season, and Adelaide audiences are the richer for the diversity of quality operatic offerings being presented by State Opera.
Brava!
Kym Clayton
When: 9 Aug
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
St Jude’s Players. St Jude’s Hall. 8 Aug 2019
If ever a hike down to Brighton was worth its weight in gold, this play shines its value; even in abjectly stormy conditions.
Geoff Britain’s production is of such excellence that it may put much professional theatre in the shadows. So immediate, intense and committed is the work that there are times when one completely forgets one is in a theatre, so closely is one relating to the protagonists on stage.
Popular theory has it that people’s hearts beat in unison when in the theatre - and one would moot that this is an ideal example of an entire audience wedded in thrall.
It happens straightaway, from the stark spot-lit opening scene whence young Rosie steps to a city bench scene on the prompt wing and describes her lonely plight as a solo backpacking girl in Europe.
Heartbroken, she tries to list the things she knows to be true. They are few. She realises she has not grown at all. Rosie’s soliloquy is so superbly delivered by Zanny Edhouse that it is met with spontaneous applause.
Rosie is the baby of the Price family, an Aussie-everyman suburban family impeccably contrived by Andrew Bovell. He has settled them in Hallett Cove where dad, 63, early-retired via redundancy from motor making, grows roses and preens his perfect back yard. That yard with its lawn, rotary clothes line, shed, old gum tree and corrugated iron fences, is the core of his world and, indeed, of archetypal Australian working class family life. Among other things, Bovell’s play is a paeon to this leafy sanctuary of suburbia, and to the post-War values which created it.
While big-budget mainstream companies have sought to go minimalist and symbolic in representing this garden and its fly-wire kitchen door domestic scene, little St Jude’s with its compact proportions and volunteers' budget, has given versatile designer Ole Wiebkin free rein to transform the stage into a really vivid micro version of the real thing, complete with scaled down Hills Hoist. It’s a triumph.
The play tells of a year in the life of the Price family, the year in which Rosie comes home to a world presenting contemporary life challenges to her three siblings and her parents. By the end of the year’s upheavals, the list of things she knows to be true has grown, and so has she. It is not an easy journey and Bovell has thrown the family some fairly confronting and topical curve balls.
As the four children have to find and depart in diverse directions, the parents must contemplate their own relationship in an emptying nest.
The performances range from good to sublime. Joshua Coldwell and Leighton Vogt play the brothers, each on a fairly perilous trajectory, each deeply moving in their way. As big sister Pip, Cheryl Douglas softly treads the painful path as the victim of a fraught mother-daughter relationship. But it is Tim Williams and Nicole Rutty as the devoted parents who really lift the bar to excellence. These are two perceptive and commanding characterisations. Award material.
Bovell delves unerringly into the suburban psyche in this very loving play. There aren’t too many nerves it doesn’t tap and Geoff Brittain’s skilful directorial hand makes certain they are well felt.
At play’s end, there’s not a dry eye in the house.
This is a wonderful production of a wonderful piece of Australiana.
Applause. Applause.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 17 Aug
Where: St Jude’s Hall, Brighton
Bookings: trybooking.com