The Cabbage & Kings Collective. Noel Lothian Hall – Adelaide Botanic Garden. 3 Mar 2019
Chris Issacs is a Western Australian playwright to watch out for. Flood was a product of his mind in 2014 and it won a Performing Arts WA prize for best new play. The Fringe production on offer is performed by recent graduates of Adelaide College of the Arts and Flinders Drama Centre. Director Max Garcia-Underwood and designer Tom Kitney are also early in their careers and years, and the whole shebang has a fresh exuberant feel.
Plot-wise, three unattached couples aged the same as the actors have a long history of hanging together and decide on a hefty two week camping trip in the middle of nowhere in northern WA. It does not give the game away to say “they unintentionally violate sacred land and an Indigenous man is murdered” because that’s what’s written in their blurb. Which is a shame, because the play provides palpable suspense by being blissfully unaware of this spoiler.
Strange noises on the first night are provided by an excellent tension-raising soundtrack, and Isaacs gives the good friends delectable individualised reactions to this and other goings on. After reasoning that the incident will not advance their careers, the second half of the play focuses on ancillary damage and discussion they didn’t anticipate through some superb writing. However, high drama was missed by the audience not witnessing the “ah ha” moment when the gang realises that the Indigenous man was simply warning them of the eponymous flood. Or maybe they don’t. The two week time lag between the incident and the flood left this point pointless.
The drama also would have ratcheted up if the characters spent more time dealing with each other instead of telling us what they are doing. There is a better play of character engagement and interaction over-stamped by blank delivery toward the open spaces above the audience. Too often, the writing resembles six simultaneous one-person plays. A more fully developed set design would be appreciated but perhaps a few white blocks had to do due to the tight scheduling in a Fringe venue.
The campers are admirably mutually supportive but they cannot save themselves. The play is a great study of integrity, leadership and group dynamics, living with guilt and secrets, and emotionally coping with bad decisions and consequences. Think Deliverance. While one couldn’t help feel there were opportunities missed in the writing, direction and design, the company conveyed a compelling and disturbing story.
David Grybowski
3 Stars
When: 2 to 17 Mar
Where: Noel Lothian Hall – Adelaide Botanic Garden
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. AC Arts Main Theatre. 2 Mar 2019
“The metaphor escaped me,” wailed an audience member as she trooped out of Palmyra.
“Wait to read the reviews,” recommended her companion.
The audience not only left Palmyra perplexed, but it left in dribs and drabs, uncertain as to whether the show was actually over or not.
There is a lot of silence in Palmyra and the silence speaks, albeit in code.
Two actors inhabit the black stage in the black auditorium. Much of the time, they do so in silence. They are on standoff, one against the other. They are frenemiies. Sometimes rather psychotic ones. They demolish white plates and they demolish the fourth wall. They seek sides from the audience. The Frenchman seeks audience sympathy. Look after this hammer and don’t let his mad friend Nasi have it.
But who is the mad one? Nasi Voutsas or Bertrand Lesca?
The audience learns that it should not stay mute. It may call the tune. Silences are long. Interjections are entertaining.
The source of antagonism between the men is a mystery. What is their relationship? Why the tension and destructiveness.
There are flashes of humour. There’s an air of absurdism. There is a sense of fatalism, cruelty, and unpredictability.
It is one of those pieces of Festival theatre which is so far outside the bounds of conventional expectation that its crashing shards of black and white aesthetics sear into mind’s eye and one knows they are there to stay and, from time to time, to be mooted.
The metaphor? Poor Palmyra, the eponymous city in Syria. Invaded and shattered, Reborn. Shattered again. Betrayed. Who can be trusted? A landscape in ruins.
War is hell. Political relationships are fragile.
Samela Harris
When: 2 to 5 Mar
Where: AC Arts Main Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Little Theatre, Royal Croquet Club, University of Adelaide. 2 Mar 2019
It’s difficult to categorise the LipSinkers. They are drag, they are queer, they are loud (oh so loud!), they are alternative, and they are completely over the top. They are all these things but on megadoses of supercharged steroids. They are so much larger than life that they give new meaning to the phrase. However you categorise them, they are just fabulous, and their show sucks you in with the overwhelming force of a show biz black-hole. The LipSinkers are an irresistible freak of nature!
Done. Enough of the superlatives
For an hour they ‘lip sync’ to a set list of songs without a break: some are obscure (you know you’ve heard it but where? when?) and some are well known, such as Queen’s iconic Bohemian Rhapsody and Abba’s Waterloo. As one song gives way to the next the constants are the troupe’s inventive break-neck pace choreography, their trashy costumes and even trashier wigs, their hilarious facial gestures and general antics, and of course their lip sync accuracy (scarily so!). It is exhausting and almost impossible to take it all in. It all happens with such rapidity that it is altogether dizzying.
Despite all the antics and the slapstick humour, there is also a serious message. There isn’t a narrative as such to the selection or sequencing of the play list, but there is cutting social commentary. In one scene two of the troupe wear face masks of Rolf Harris and Cardinal George Pell while they bat away the ping pong balls of society’s disgust and accusations. It almost happens in the blink of an eye and one is left rapidly pondering how the current song choice ‘fits’, then it’s onto the next.
By the end of the show, the stage is in absolute chaos with costumes and hand properties littering the entire space. One leaves the event shaking their head and asking oneself ‘what the hell was that all about?!’ Whatever the answer, one is glad the tsunami is past, but the smile on one’s face persists for some time.
Kym Clayton
4 Stars
When: 2 to 17 Mar
Where: Little Theatre, Royal Croquet Club
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Windmill Theatre Company and Imaginate Theatre. Old Queen’s Theatre. 2 Mar 2019
Once upon a time, Baba Yaga was a sinister and ugly old witch from a Slavic folktale who was prone to eating children and lived in the forest in a house which teetered about on chicken legs. She came from the era of Struwwelpeter and Hansel and Gretel when terrifying tales of cannibalism and child abuse were considered very nice for young minds.
We’re all a bit more sensitive and PC these days, and so is Baba Yaga, since the Windmill and Imaginate creatives have given the old witch a “reboot” into modern idiom.
Now, from deformed and smelly old hag, she is an exotically glamorous eccentric with special powers, an insatiable hunger, and a bent for jelly babies. Instead of living in the swampy forest, she dwells on Floor 101 of the Poultry Park Apartments tower block. It’s a pretty austere place with myriad repressive rules, most importantly about noise. Every sound the poor receptionist makes is amplified and she is harangued by angry tenants calling for silence. Of course, Baba Yaga is another contributor to the din and when the receptionist goes up to Baba's lofty world, she becomes embroiled and thrown into strange and dangerous predicaments.
The design team has come up with a very compact and simple set of deceptive sophistication. Windows pop up allowing for the videoed faces of assorted tenants and, beside the reception desk, is a simple elevator projection which enables Vaselina, the receptionist, to ride to the heights of 101 and, like Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, even beyond. Baba Yaga’s world with its sacred cactus flowers and amazing jungle is all vivid animation and video projection. It is clear and effective. While Vaselina is attired in a strange puffy hooded fashion confection, Baba Yaga is in strident yellow with a shopping basket hat and multi-coloured accessories. But it is her dramatic eye makeup and the madly expressive mouth with its savage gash of lipstick on which the focus falls.
Elizabeth Hay, a little shrill in her assumed child’s voice, is every inch the innocent abroad as she falls into Baba Yaga’s thrall, a nice performance. But Christine Johnston steals the show. She is the show. She creates a big, big character, untamed and dangerous, yet funny and creative. Hers is a powerhouse performance and her vocal range is truly astounding.
One is not sure the original Baba Yagas would recognise this 2019 embodiment as one of their own. She is the mischievous mystery hag de jour starring in a delectable concoction of theatre for the young.
Samela Harris
When: 2 to 6 Mar
Where: Old Queen’s Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Festival Theatre. 2 Mar 2019
Adelaide Festival directors Neil Armfield and Rachel Healy knew that the festival is bereft without a headliner opera, and they have given us some doozers: Barrie Kosky’s Saul in 2017, Armfield’s own Hamlet last year, and presently Mozart’s The Magic Flute directed by Suzanne Andrade and Barrie Kosky.
Barrie Kosky, currently artistic director at Komische Oper Berlin, is regarded by many as the most creative and inventive opera director today. But for those old enough to party in 1996, he is fondly remembered for his Red Square after-hours entertainment venue in the festival of that year. Who in attendance will ever forget the dueling Caterpillar excavators, or the dancing Mini Morrises - choreographed to classical music and lit like a disco? The wunderkind from Melbourne was only 29 years old at the time and the youngest-ever Adelaide Festival director.
Except for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, the entire Magic Flute production - including soloists, chorus and conductor, Jordan de Souza - is imported from the Komische Oper and has already played in 22 countries and wowed half a million people.
Komische is German for comic and The Magic Flute is exemplary of Kosky’s flamboyant and colourful style. New to Adelaide audiences will be his collaboration with Suzanne Andrade. Andrade and Paul Barritt co-founded 1927, a British theatre company leading the world in integrating theatre, music and animation. Whereas opera was brought to animation in Looney Tunes’s What’s Opera, Doc? in 1957, the cartoons are bought to the opera in The Magic Flute. The fairy tale concerns young lovers who must pass tests in order to live happily ever after. Just like today, they must attain wisdom and beauty, or they die.
The entire set is only a couple of metres deep. It is basically a screen for projected animation with a few revolving platforms at various levels resembling statue plinths for the singers. The whole effect is mind blowing. Anything is possible – pink elephants lounging in giant martini glasses, forests of flowers, mechanicals and clocks, anything of whimsy and fantasy can be conjured and disappeared in a blink. It makes one giddy; someone described it like drinking ten cups of coffee. Queen of the Night, Christina Poulitsi, delivers her crystal-clear soprano in the guise of a giant leggy spider. The animation is perfectly timed with arias, singer interaction, the lighting and orchestra. Cute things, like petting a cartoon cat, or threatening things, like thrown knives are conjured. Just when the wow factor is about to wear off, the narrative commands a whole new ravishing scenario.
The animation is charming in that it’s obviously all hand-made and is influenced by silent film. Metropolis machinery, clocks and a Buster Keatonesque Papageno lovingly played by Joan Martin-Royo. Villain Monostatos becomes Nosferatu. All dialogue is transcribed to printed words that sail from the speaker. Notes fly out of instruments.
Mozart and librettist Emanuel Schikaneder would be very happy with this vaudeville romp so well mortised with animation. Double bravo!
David Grybowski
5 stars
When: 1 to 3 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au