Adelaide Fringe. Wielding Theatre. 8 Mar 2019
Gravity Guts takes this enormous thing called the universe, in which we all feel as an inestimable, inadequate, barely-there grain of nothing, and turns that on its head.
In an endearingly direct, highly sophisticated comic performance, playwright/actor Sophia Simmons’ early teenage character Sophia eagerly showers us with tales, knowledge and enthusiasm for space.
This witty, delightfully cheeky being sparks laughter with astonishing ease. Sophia is a child possessing an extraordinary ability to see the universe from pre Big Bang to now, with a hook into humanity that makes a warm, comprehendible connection between us all and the great unknown.
There is a purpose to this, one in which the singular power of Simmons’ writing, supported by the finest direction of a solo work seen in some time from Milly Cooper, offers a big emotional turn to the work.
Sophia’s family life is not an easy one. It has turmoil and stresses, which find themselves intertwined and expressed through the seeming chaotic order of forces governing the universe.
With utmost ease and extremely precise craft, Simmons and Cooper’s production becomes an extraordinary, deeply affecting meditation on the space between hearts and minds more fully considered and understood in light of the awe that is endless space; all it contains.
Gravity Guts is a remarkable achievement as theatre for all ages. Simmons, originally from Adelaide, has built well on the promise shown when winning Flinders University Young Playwright Award (2013), then Pioneer Playwright Award (2018).
David O’Brien
5 Stars
When: 6 to 10 Mar
Where: Tandanya, Live From Channel 9, Tandanya Arts Café
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Matt Byrne Media. Maxims. 7 Mar 2019
I can assure you that no marriages were consummated in the making of this show, but out of an audience of a hundred, maybe two marriages were saved and a lot more saw something good about it. Producer and director Matthew Byrne’s intention may have been to savage Nine Network’s Married At First Sight for its risk of ritual embarrassment, but maybe he realised that the original couldn’t be any worse, or why kick a dog that doesn’t know any better. His spoofs of scenes from the series too closely resembled the worst of the real thing. What he has written instead is a compassionate, thoughtful, and wryly humorous love letter to marriage, following the formula of all his other Fringe shows and the affections of 2014’s dateless.com and The Luv Boat of 2016. One is beginning to think that as well as being a fine actor-comedian-producer in the manner of Benny Hill and Bob Hope, Byrne is also a sentimental bloke.
The fans of Byrne’s Fringe shows – and there are many or he wouldn’t be gifting a new show every year for 16 years - will recognise the routines that seem so constant and formatted, but the excoriating fan mail would flood in if he left anything out. Two couples, one young and one ageless, will have to cope when the masks come off. We follow their feelings from the reasoning of going on such a crazy show to reflections on the outcome. On the journey, joker Irish priests, rapacious wedding planners, go-with-the-flow celebrants, nervous parents, crappy vows, and the worst wedding parties possible are encountered.
Jokes are sometimes borrowed, sometimes new. What’s the difference between a wife and a girlfriend? 20 kilos. Marriage isn’t a word, it’s a sentence. She jumped out of a wedding cake, but then she got bulimia, and the cake jumped out of her. The thing is there’s so many, possibly a couple hundred, and once your first laugh comes, the rest come easier. Besides Byrne himself, two other entertainers return from last year’s Hott Property. Amber Platten is precious in her dumb blond mode, and is objectified mercilessly. Brad Butvila presents more sides to the human condition than a Hindi god. Rose Vallen is as warm as a hot water bottle on a winter night.
Annually, my resistance to the two hour format retreats from a vaudevillian onslaught of laughter and love.
David Grybowski
3 stars
When: 13 Feb to 23 Mar
Where: Maxims, Norwood
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. 29 King William Street, Adelaide. 7 Mar 2019
The shop premise at 29 King William Street has the squeaky clean, white-gleaming clinical look of a High Street cosmetics retail outlet or maybe a surgery. The host turns your gaze to a bag of human fat and then to a display of package soap labeled, Self Human Soap. “Would you like to try the soap?” Handy is a sink and said host helps you lather up and experience the feel of soap made with the by-product of liposuction. Your questioning reveals there were only 2000 bars of soap manufactured in 2016 – each made by hand and individually numbered. I have No. 0875 occupying my desk as I write.
Schuld is German for an amalgam of guilt and debt. Let’s just say you owe something and you’re feeling guilty about it. But it’s a soap business and fabrik means factory. By now you are flabbergasted and intrigued, or if you are thinking of Auschwitz, maybe you should go home, or stay to learn that it’s only a show in an arts festival in 2019, and maybe German-born Dutch creator Julian Hetzel is on to something radically new. Your small party is escorted out of the shop and onto King William Street, around the corner, and into the bowels of the building. Thus begins an incredible education into the particulars of human soap and Hetzel’s virtuous circle to fund the sinking of water bores in a Congo village.
You should experience what happens next without the forearming of my précis. After a disorienting hour in the building, our little group ejaculated through a final door and spilled onto the alleyway. We looked at each other with wonder and couldn’t stop talking about it.
P.S. One can’t wait for the sequel – a vitamin drink made from human blood. Just kidding.
David Grybowski
When: 1 to 17 March
Where: 29 King William Street, Adelaide
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Odeon Theatre. 7 Mar 2019
The Two Jews are actually sitting in the theatre, watching with studied indifference as a full house Adelaide Festival audience files its way in from the jam of an epic foyer queue. Their performance premise is that they are waiting in the foyer for a show and that they are rather early. They also posit that they are their own fathers, that their autobiographical references are really about their sons who bear their names. Just to be tricksy and keep the audience on its toes, one assumes.
In front of them on the stage is posted the biggest cheat sheet in history; running order and cue reminders writ large on huge white cards.
Brian Lipson, experimental theatre legend, and Gideon Obarzanek, choreographer extraordinaire, are semi-retired from public life. Lipson lives in London and Obarzanek in Melbourne. They get together to perform tales from their lives as a festivals party turn. It’s a charming concept and quite irresistible to audiences. Hence sell-out houses.
The two Jews have crafted the show so it looks as if it is really not a lot of bother. They have long silences, tell funny stories, snipe at each other, via the references to their sons, have more pseudo-awkward silences, and have something of an all-out row over the State of Israel whence came Obarzanek. This is as refreshing and enlightening as it is quite shocking. It really pins one’s ears back. But it is a reflection of the intelligence and courage of these two high achieving men, unafraid to balance a program about life in showbiz with some fierce rubbing of a raw old nerve. One tips one’s yarmulka, so to speak.
Lucy Guerin must be in there somewhere, directing those meaningful pauses, just as she has choreographed their finale, a singularly esoteric dance piece performed to an uncomfortably loud electronic droning sound. While the movements are interesting and aesthetic, that noise is profoundly puzzling.
Thus is this a particularly offbeat Festival offering from a couple of arts pinups who happen to be Jewish. Vunderlekh!
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 10 Mar
Where: Odeon Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Anya Anastasia. 7 March
A star falls. Sort of. Well, a little bit maybe, involving a lot of riotousness, outrageousness and thundering hilarity.
Anya Anastasia: The Show is storied Adelaide cabaret star Anya Anastasia’s farewell to cabaret. This show is just her being herself in a wild style show, which might bring to mind for some Tim Curry’s husky, sad lyric feels as Frankenfurter, “whatever happened to Fay Wray?”
Well Anya kinda went off the deep end in a battle with cabaret versus burlesque, demands of the biz and the twists and turns off life.
There’s hope of sorts. Her electric piano is adorned with gold lettering, ‘cabaret star for hire’ and the ever faithful ukulele brings her back to career beginnings in the sweetest way for long term fans.
Anastasia attacks what she’s leaving and what she’s lived with the most intensely concentrated delivery of a decades long, well-honed comic schtick, downright lyric emotional honesty, and physical comedy. There’s sadness and deep vulnerability hidden behind this blindingly brilliant comitragic performance.
Deep down, there’s a bitter-sweetness to this thrilling hour that makes you understand the universal feeling ‘what do I have to do to get a break around here?’
David O’Brien
5 Stars
When: 1 to 16 Mar
Where: Gluttony, The Masonic Lodge, Phoenix Room
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au