House of Sand, Rumpus Theatre. 23 Oct 2019
In calm waters, drifting gently around at anchor, Jules and Tom while away the hours. They have something to resolve. It is not quite clear what.
They have an established relationship. Like siblings, they have ritual games. They have whiskey, champagne, mandarins and Kwells. Day turns into night and then on to day. Kobe Donaldson's lighting changes of dusk and dawn are gorgeous on the sleek white stage against a nice rippling water background projection. He depicts time which is passing swiftly. To begin with.
The play's opening has a feeling of beauty and serenity. The boat’s shape is loosely suggested by the layout of various props. Tom is idly plucking tunes on his guitar; Jules is intent on her sketch pad. When the characters begin to speak it is lively small talk, streams of consciousness, word and sound games. They are interesting individuals and between playwright Sarah Hamilton’s script and Charley Sanders’ direction, there is an artful sense of privacy in the little boat world and, with it, a sense of intimacy and even voyeurism for the audience.
There are some brilliant moments, especially when the pair zoom around on casters to simulate swimming in the sea. It is joyful and very effective and just one of the elements which works superbly in this theatre artwork.
After a while, the lighting dims to uncertain muted hues and time becomes murky as the mood changes in the boat. There are stresses and long, long periods of silence. And into the dim hours on the water, time starts to stand still. Too still. The momentum slackens and there is the sense that the boat is going nowhere and nor is the play. Here is where the rewrite or the blue pencil should come in. The script and the two splendid actors, Max Garcia-Underwood and Amy Victoria Brooks, reclaim the tension and the play reaches an interesting, if slightly puzzling denouement.
It is clear that Sarah Hamilton is a writer of great promise.
And, there is the Charley Sanders factor. The zing and zeal of this spirited theatre-maker continues to breathe life onto the Adelaide stage.
The new theatre venue, Rumpus, is a magical community achievement. It is a wild and roomy warehouse world amid the factory chimneys of Bowden. It is spruced up and fresh and fun, abeit on warm nights audiences may be advised to take a fan into the theatre itself.
And if the The Split opening night audience is anything to go by, there is a glamorous independent theatre demographic hungry for challenge and intrigue in the theatre. Certainly, they were enthusiastically appreciative of the austerity and the experimental nature of this particular new theatre work.
Samela Harris
When: 22 Oct to 3 Nov
Where: Rumpus, The Old 505 Theatre, 100 Sixth Street Bowden.
Bookings: trybooking.com
Nitin Sawhney. OzAsia Festival. Festival Theatre. 18 Oct 2019
Nitin Sawhney is surely some kind of Renaissance musician. His career as producer, composer, DJ, and multi-instrumentalist has produced 20 albums, and 60 film scores, including the recent Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. He has collaborated with Paul
McCartney, Sting, Anoushka Shankar, Jeff Beck, Annie Lennox, Andy Serkis, Akram Khan, and the London Symphony Orchestra. He has curated festivals and lectured in universities. He has performed regularly in Australia- at the Melbourne Festival and at WOMADelaide, as a DJ and musical director in 2011. Over twenty years he has been every kind of success.
His breakthrough moment was his third album for Outcaste Records, Beyond Skin. For the liner notes he wrote – “I believe in Hindu philosophy/I am not religious/I am a pacifist/I am a British Asian”.
With even more emphasis he adds – “My identity and my history are defined only by myself – beyond politics, beyond nationality, beyond religion and beyond skin.”
It is striking to read now, amidst the often bitterly contested debates of current identity politics, such implacable sentiments from 1999, at the edge of a new millennium, rejecting ideas of caste and clan, and the fetters of primitive belief. All good reasons to return to the album and perform it renewed and re-energised, twenty years later, in the midst of migration persecution, Brexit end-times and pan-national Trumpery.
On stage at the Festival Theatre, in one of only three performances this time in Australia, Nitin Sawhney is relaxed, urbane and disarmingly understated. Greeting the audience the moment he steps out he immediately introduces his band. There are just five of them – Sawhney and tabla player Aref Durvesh from the original Beyond Skin project, and three young women: violinist Anna Phoebe McElligott and vocalists Nicki Wells and Eva Stone.
They settle in to Sunset from Sawhney’s 2001 album, Prophecy. Sawhney on Spanish guitar and Durvesh, layering rhythms on drums, are like bookends either side of the stage while McElligott’s starts her swooping violin and Wells and Stone begin unfurling Nitin’s signature ethereal vocals - drawn from Indian classical traditions, but reminiscent also of the abstract explorations of Dido and even Sigur Ros.
Along with a Paco Pena composition, played with dazzling, flamenco clarity by Sawhney, other items from the Prophecy album follow – Moonrise, and with Sawhney at the piano, his tribute to Nelson Mandela - Breathing Light, which includes the quote from Mandela’s book: “We are free to be freed”.
After this interlude, Sawhney is ready to introduce the centrepiece for the evening, a complete performance of Beyond Skin in all its twelve components. He describes what a personal project the album was- recording his parents’ recollections of their migration experiences from India to the UK, gathering tracks from various vocalists such as Sanchita Farruque, and musicians from the Rizwan Muazzam Qawwali group (nephews of the late legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), sampling BBC news broadcasts about India’s controversial nuclear weapons testing, and putting them all, as he says jokingly, into my “Kenwood mixer”.
The opening song, Broken Skin, begins with the words of the Indian Prime Minister announcing a successful nuclear test, anathema to Hindu philosophy and Sawhney’s own declared pacifism, and segues into the Farruque vocals – now capably managed by Vicki Wells and Eva Stone in a kind of Indian Soul with a tight backbeat from Durvesh and sinuous violin riffs from Anna Phoebe McElligott.
It is a strong, vibrant sound from the band, simpler than the richly overdubbed album, more urgent and immediate, yet incorporating the loops and disturbing political quotes which inflect and disrupt the swooning repetitions of Nitin’s compositions. Letting Go, the album’s second track is even more beguiling, with its Dido/Sister Bliss/Rollo echoes of English pastoral even as the lyrics demand breaking from traditions and habits to find a more principled future.
Homelands is a good example of Sawhney’s bold eclecticism. Opening with the Sufi chant from Rizwan and Muazzam, it moves via flamenco to Portuguese fado to emphasise the variety and range of “home”. In performance, Wells and Stone cover the considerable demands of these vocal styles with admirable panache.
For the lyrics to The Pilgrim, Sawhney looks to the rapper, Hussain Yoosuf himself to deliver the cascading words- “Life is like a puzzle not pieced yet…”. Not in person, but fed through the sound desk with a driving beat from Aref Durvesh.
The various shifts of mood between tracks work even better in performance. From the pianistic ebb and flow of Tides to the keening vocals in Nadia the compositions reveal their richness and harmonic pleasure.
In Immigrant and Nostalgia, Sawhney moves especially close to home with the intro recording of his father’s recollection of an embassy visit in India prior to migrating to England:
“They showed us Kew Gardens pictures and pictures of the various parts of England. That it is all that beautiful and everything is just right. And that’s why we just applied for the voucher…”
Sawhney is almost tearful as he describes his late father’s optimism and sense of adventure, a voice we now hear on an Australian stage. The ironies of the present day hostility to migration, and indifference to refugee displacement, were not lost on the Adelaide audience, nor would they have been at the Royal Albert Hall in London when this live version of Beyond Skin premiered only weeks ago.
Each item adds to the musical and thematic texture of this rewarding meditation – the kathak rhythms of Serpents and the sinuous vocals (Nicki Wells and Zoe Stone again proving extraordinarily versatile) in Anthem Without Nation. Concluding the song cycle is Beyond Skin, featuring the sample of broadcaster Edward Murrow reading the ominous words of the atom bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer quoting from the Bhagavad Gita – “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
For encores Nitin Sawhney and his excellent group perform Dead Man from his Philtre album and, in duet with Aref Durvesh, with Prophecy a sitar-sounding guitar instrumental he has played in many places – Nelson Mandela’s garden, in South America, and on the beaches of Arnhem Land. It is a splendidly celebratory note on which to close.
When: 18 Oct
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
OzAsia Festival. Festival Theatre. 18 Oct 2019
Never has there been a sight like it in the Festival Theatre - a sea of bobbing hijabs. Siti Nurhaliza is a star with a massive following throughout Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. She has six million followers on Instagram alone and awards beyond measure. Hence, adoring young female fans had swarmed to the OzAsia Festival for her one-night-only appearance, not only from Adelaide but packs of them from Melbourne and Sydney, too. The Centre was a-buzz with the effusive crowds, even providing a prayer room for pre-concert worship.
The auditorium was adorned with huge pinup images of Siti and the stage was ready with the band and backup singers in place when the star made her entrance. It was met with a cacophony. Elevated iPhones shone forth, recording the thrill of the moment. No one minded the lights or even the no-photos warning signs. This was a Siti thing and this mass of exuberant humanity was on the same page. As Siti began to sing, so did they, softly and lovingly. They knew her every word. She’d leave the end of song lines for them to complete. A love fest was underway.
Siti is as beautiful as she is talented. She wears her hijab as a stunning fashion item atop glittering long gowns. Islamic glamour can be utterly gorgeous. Religious codes seem to be entirely respected amid the showmanship of Siti’s concerts. But it is an emancipated Islam in this generation of young music lovers from our neighbouring countries. And music is the great bonding uplift of the world.
Siti chatted merrily with the audience, mostly in Bahasa Malaysia. She spoke of music as the food of love and of the pleasure, with her husband and young daughter, of exploring Adelaide and what language fun they had been having with her name which the Aussies think of as “city”. In her own tongue “city" could end less lyrically in translation as “kampung”. She loved Adelaide and was blown away by the new hospital.
She sang a series of her best-known pop songs. She’s been writing songs since she was 16. She is now 40 with a history of hits and even an entire album of songs in English. She sang some of those, too. Her dance troupe came and went behind her, exquisitely choreographed and with a physical discipline which suggested that had come from a classical training. If Siti changed costume three times, the dancers did it ten or more and at the end of the show displaying a shimmering blitz of traditional Malay ceremonial attire.
Siti Nurhaliza sings in tones pure and potent, her vocal range effortlessly vast. They call her Asia’s Celine Dion, but one would argue that her timbre has a mellow superiority to that of the Canadian. Some say she sounds like honey; if so, only like the rich power of Manuka. She is a smooth professional at the peak of a sensational career. She is she. No one else.
To some of her songs, cries rang out from the audience “cinta” - beautiful. “Indah” also “beautiful”. And many times “we love you Siti”.
Before the show was over, she had the audience up and dancing, young and old, Malaysians and Aussies as one.
It was a beautiful thing. It was a special and privileged OzAsia experience.
And now, thanks to OzAsia, Siti Nurhaliza has a new fan base in Adelaide. Yes, we love you, too, Siti.
Samela Harris
When: 18 Oct
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: Closed
OzAsia Festival. Nexus. 18 Oct 2019
As a new work based on the story of this city’s founding planner, OzAsia’s production, Light, has been highly anticipated and a pre-booked sell-out.
It tells not only of our own Colonel William Light but of his father, Francis Light, the man attributed as founder of Penang, or at least the man who claimed the island for the British. Both Lights have complex histories much of which is familiar to the people of Adelaide. So, Australian writer/director Thomas Henning has bitten off a huge chunk of well-examined culture which, in this production produced and designed by Malaysia’s TerryandTheCuz, has had to be culled into two hours of performance.
An eager audience crammed into bleachers in the cramped Nexus space for the production’s opening night which, they were told, was to be more of a tech run since the sets had been delayed by customs and were newly-arrived.
Interesting sets they are. For the Francis Light narrative, they are dark-floored and austere with a strange shallow grave-like pit in the centre. Dates and places are identified as flash cards on a pinboard. Linked by Gavin Yap as narrator, facts are delivered as a hot peppering of information, guns and opium, colonial imperialism, racism, and sexism. Martin Blum plays Light as a fairly low-class English adventurer against Junji Delfino as his Penang wife, Martina Rozells, a woman who was purported to be of aristocratic blood but whose true ethnicity was mysterious. She is depicted as proud and elegant by Junji Delfino, a truly splendid actress whose presence onstage in various characters throughout the two bio-tales is quite magnetic. As her story tails off, she’s seen in widow’s weeds and the floor rises up in dramatic denouement. It’s not a happy story, but the company gives the whole show a smattering of somewhat incongruous levity with revue-like punchlines and some zany anachronisms.
William Light’s story is not a happy one, either. Gavin Yap plays him as a handsome loser, blighted by opposition and health. At times, his despair and frustration is heartbreaking, and well contrived by Yap.
Delfino embodies his wives and the fascinating Maria Gandy, his stalwart partner and companion in Adelaide. Blum struts and manipulates in the spirit of the other so-called founding fathers of this city.
Here, the stage is bright and white. A TV monitor plays newscasts on one side and a Light watercolour landscape features on the other. There is a desk and the floor is adorned with neat stacks of loose papers, symbolising Light’s plans. But it is the bleak little bed with its white sheets which sings the song of poor Light who, rather oddly, is costumed in white underwear throughout.
Again, the company has devised a striking climax to the play. No spoilers except to say that playwright Thomas Henning’s research uncovered reports of Maria Gandy’s last years with an entourage of arrogant spitting dwarves and one contemplates that this strange piece of history is worthy of a whole new work.
Henning’s premise in this double-barrelled work is that history is malleable, always partially recalled in different ways through different eyes. Hence, he offers a scattergun of known facts and an imagining of underscoring impressions and influences.
If one is looking for a history text book, one will not find it here. What one does find is an off-centre sketchpad of black and white, light and dark human dramas.
It is more a piece of art than conventional theatre. And, as one processes its emotions and imagery, it stands up as a defiantly original and provocative creation; just the sort of thing that festivals should be about.
Samela Harris
When: 18 and 19 Oct
Where: Nexus
Bookings: bass.net.au
STARC Productions. Bakehouse Theatre. 11 Oct 2019
As two middle-aged and unbeautiful people, Stefanie Rossi and Marc Clement start off with the challenge of playing up and ugly. They are both unconventional enough in good looks to swing it - just. They have designed the set aptly with a vaguely vulgar bedroom and adjoining kitchen a la New York efficiency. They have their ‘Noo Yawk’ accents, oh so emphatically exact.
So where’s the rub in this production directed by Tony Knight as is the tradition in this three-person company? Perhaps it is that Rossi and Clement are actors for whom intimacy comes naturally. As they work through the developments and setbacks of the couple in this 1980s romantic comedy by Terrance McNally, there is a streak of archness, as if they have to try to be strangers. Rossi depicts the awkwardness of the middle-aged waitress with a lot of fussing and flicking of the famous Rossi locks and incessant fretful costume-primping. Less may be more.
As Frankie, she is testing the waters of potential romance with Johnny, the short order cook she’s fancied for some time across the counter. He is looking desperately for love and a soul mate, grasping at background co-incidences to underscore his hopes and grasping at Frankie’s body with scary desperation. Clement has him seeming really give-him-an-inch-and-he’ll-take-a-mile creepy and one wishes, as Frankie tries to make him leave her apartment, that he would actually go. He’s like a drunken error to be sorely regretted in the morning and never seen again. Please.
The sex scenes are well-handled, an interesting balance between lust and repulsion.
In ambivalent desperation, Frankie tries to trust the groping neediness of Johnny. Therein, the play is something of a sad lesson for one and all. And, as a comedy, it is gruellingly sad.
There is optimism as the two lonely people in the big city look out the window at the break of dawn, but the audience is left to ponder their future.
Samela Harris
When: 11 to 19 Oct
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com