Gilded Balloon and Redbeard Theatre in Assoc. with Holden Street Theatres. Holden Street Theatres. 13 Feb 2019
Henry Naylor is a gifted story-teller.
That’s a lavish and timeless compliment. And, once again, he’s a five-star story-teller at the Adelaide Fringe.
Following the triumphs of Borders, Angel, Echoes, and The Collector, he brings Games - another highly political play based on historical truths.
The “Games” are the Olympic Games of 1936 which were held in Berlin and for which, under the Nazi regime, Germany’s Jewish athletes had been marginalised and banned from state training facilities and thus any chance to gaining a competitive edge.
To flesh out his riveting story, Naylor has selected two Jewish female athletes of the day, a fencer called Helene Mayer and a high-jumper called Gretel Bergman, and traced the travails they might have faced under the escalating Nazi persecution. He has breathed life and character into them, setting them in unlikely but historically credible conflict. Helene is the prim, smug established champion, a local pin-up adored as The Little Hay. People keep her statue on their mantlepieces. Certainly Gretel does. She is a proud Jew and highly motivated by the idea of proving Jewish supremacy in sport. Helene, on the other hand, wishes to deflect from her Jewish background and identify herself exclusively as a fencer. Gretel is aghast at this and the two spar on the subject over the course of several years as Hitler’s reign grows stronger and the racial divisions and Jewish persecution strengthens around them.
Playwright Naylor's supreme skill shines both with his astute use of language and in establishing dramatic tension as this story evolves. Most importantly, he has created two complex characters who command the audience’s interest and emotions. Of course, the two actors, Sophie Shad as Helene and Tessie Orange-Turner as Gretel, are a vital ingredient in fleshing out those characters and bringing Naylor’s play to vital life. Their performances ring with passion and clarity. It is a riveting piece of theatre.
Directed by Louise Skaaning, the production is staged in the intimacy of The Arch theatre where the high stage is dominated by long red banners of the Nazi ilk draped over black curtains. Simple and dramatic. Shad is neat and restrained, wearing a crisp white fencing uniform, her blonde hair in looped plaits. In track shorts, long-limbed Orange-Turner is all passion and pent-up energy. Adversity has fired her on a mission. The performers switch and swap, neatly patching together the narrative. The suspense grows. Soundscape throbs through the theatre. Smoke hisses forth. And, the denouement descends with the inevitability of history and, perhaps, the underlying suggestion that there are no guarantees that other evil regimes may be lurking in the wings of this troubled world.
It is a Fringe must-see.
Samela Harris
5 Stars
When: 13 Feb to 16 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
The Holden Street Theatres' Edinburgh Fringe Award 2018 in Assoc. with Stephen Joseph Theatre and Tara Finney Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 13 Feb 2019
Naivete, stupidity, vanity, and inadequacy; many are the reasons schoolgirls find themselves pregnant and rarely do they find a happy chappy willing to take on responsibility for unwanted progeny.
Hence Yasmin’s utter anguish when her pregnancy test is positive. She’s a vapid Scarborough teen, a bit trashy with low self-esteem and an alcoholic mother. She knows she’ll have to go it alone.
No end of education has slowed this sad phenomenon. It has transcended generations. It is all around us. These ubiquitous schoolgirl single mums even sustain cable TV series.
Now, with a play written in the UK by Christopher York, the theme is re-iterated as a one-woman drama.
In the blackness of Holden Street’s Studio Theatre, Yasmin is spot-lit on a static playground roundabout. This is her arrested childhood, her cruelled innocence. She writhes, she leaps, she proclaims, she has sex with a DJ and gives birth on the box core of this structure. She paces around it, darts around it and lurches around it as she swings through character changes, fleshing out the unkindness of a tough working class world and the psychological acrobatics an ill-starred teen must be able to perform to stand against the tide of her own misfortune. Love sneaks in for baby Jack, but it is serrated by regrets and fear of dispossession.
London actress Serena Manteghi embodies this hapless girl, giving her a strident, shrill voice and a strong Yorkshire accent. Her delivery is so piercing and rapid-fire that one often struggles for clarity. She feels like Julie Walters on steroids. She seems inexhaustibly frenetic. Volume is her weapon. She assaults the audience with her pain and anger. She shouts. She screams. She confronts the hearing as much as the emotions. Hers is not a performance for sensitive ears.
Manteghi is lithe and lean and fit, wearing gym gear, swearing and flailing against the onslaught of Yasmin's plight. She has a wonderfully elastic face which she contorts into the characters of Yasmin’s world, into crude sods and sneering contemptuous outsiders. Her transformations are striking.
The playwright has given a classical edge to Yasmin’s tragic tale with threads of poetry and has equipped Yasmin with the symbolism of Icarus and Dedalus as she rallies to the values of motherhood. Ah, for a rocket to the stars.
The power of human optimism finds a path and little Jack is perhaps born to be her saviour. Or not. It is a tough, unsympathetic world out there.
Samela Harris
4 Stars
When: 13 Feb to 17 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Therry Dramatic Society. Arts Theatre. 8 Feb 2019
It’s amazing how the old girl always does it; has one guessing until the end.
Go Back for Murder is perhaps the trickiest of the Agatha Christie stage plays since half of it is confined to intense one-on-one interview scenes set in the 1950s with the second half a massive dissected flashback to 16 years earlier.
Its strategy is to dislodge the whodunnit’s identity from the evidence of five people who were present when the crime was committed. How does time distort memory?
When first written as a Poirot novel, Christie named this story Five Little Pigs. When she changed the name, she also replaced Poirot with a young English lawyer called Justin Fogg. And here he is, sleek and handsome, artfully embodied by Simon Lancione, sitting at his desk with his 1950s telephone consulting Carla Le Marchant, the daughter of his father’s old flame, Caroline Crale. Of course, it is all wildly Christie-complicated. His father was the lawyer who defended Caroline back in the 1930s and now Carla, whose mother died in prison, has received a letter from beyond the grave declaring Caroline was not guilty after all. So, Carla, who has been raised in Canada, has come back to England on a quest to clear her mother’s name before she marries. The actress who plays Carla has to double as Caroline in the flashback.
Chanelle Le Roux’s characterisation of Carla reminds of the American actress Chloe Sevigny with her swift delivery and her crisp accent. It’s an outstanding performance albeit, ironically, she seems less at home in the transition to the British inflections of the mother, Caroline.
Because the denouement is delivered in flashback, everyone in the cast bar the victim and Ms. Le Roux has to age 16 years - a very tall order which the Therry players accomplish effectively.
But first, they play on a stage cleverly divided into small offices: two with desks and phones; the other with side table and kettle, it being the home of the old governess, Miss Williams. Good lighting and swift cues make the conceit work nicely, along with torrents of information from the characters. It’s a wordy play, its verbosity a bit much for some.
When glamorous Elsa, now Lady Markham, sweeps onto the stage in the form of Zanny Edhouse, one is reminded of Vivien Leigh. If anything, Edhouse sustains this confident sense of vanity and poise as she loses years down to her time as the murder victim’s alluring young model. Her stride in flat shoes adds an extra dimension. It is another exceptional performance within this production.
Indeed, veteran director Norm Caddick has rounded up quite a thrilling cast of fresh and very able actors. He also has elicited from them a beautifully measured and very English delivery. Christie to the enunciated “T”.
Heather Riley captures superbly the essence of the good, English governess in Miss Williams, immaculate in age transition. Lani Gerbi has the biggest transition. After asserting an interesting adult as Carla’s disfigured half-sister in the first Act, she must transform to child in the revelatory flashback, to which end Gerbi gives the audience a welcome giggle with her lumbering childish petulance.
The supporting cast, especially Philip Blake and Jeff Rogers, keep the British upper lip nicely stiff, while Graham Lamonby as the amateur chemist and family friend, Meredith Blake, with his brother played by Jeff Baker, are pleasantly bumbling but vital ingredients to the plot which involves herbs and drinks and fingerprints and complex motives.
As the murder victim, the egocentric skirt-chasing artist Amyas, Stephen Bills does not have to age up. He just has to chew on paint brushes and be a devilishly handsome rotter. He does this with such aplomb that one is not a bit sad when he is knocked off.
Nick Spottiswoodes’s today-and-yesterday sets are nicely evocative and the frocks, really, are lovely. Brava Gillian Cordell.
Samela Harris
When: 8 to 26 Feb
Where: Arts Theatre
Bookings: trybooking.com
Return Fire Productions. Dunstan Playhouse. 5 Feb 2019
Seniors were so keen not to miss a moment of Senior Moments that three quarters of an hour before curtain, the Playhouse foyer was utterly jammed with balding old gents in check shirts and groomed grey grannies in floaty tops. It was like swimming through geriatric jam to get to the box office. But, there is one big plus about a full house of early birds. As front of house staff avowed, late comers were not interrupting this show.
Senior Moments is a nice, meaty piece of old-fashioned revue theatre. It is 90 minutes of skits about old people and getting old. That cast members are reading their lines from scripts seems perfectly normal. Much of the show is about forgetfulness. It is also about changing values and political correctness. Making the point about political correctness turns out to be politically incorrect. But old people remember old fashioned bigotry which seemed devoid of rancour. They are puzzled by today’s extreme sensitivities. One of the best skits of the show is focused on this theme. It is called No Need and it consists of those two beloved Australian stars, Max Gilles and John Wood, sitting at a bar table pondering the way in which people simply did not talk about sexual mores and gender issues back in the 1950s. There was “no need”. It is a profound piece of observation and, of course, it comes with a punch line. There are plenty of those, not all equally terrific, for that is the luck of the draw in revues.
But what a fabulous cast. There’s the eternally vivacious Benita Collings, the living legend of Play School. In this show, they parody Play School as Old School, of course. Everyone has grown up. Benita conducts proceedings from a lectern. A scatter of skits ensues.
Distinguished stage and TV actor Russell Newman is there with, oh, what a lovely voice. Kim Lewis is the sparkling, leaping youngie among the oldies. But there also are two actual juveniles, Christian Barratt-Hill and Emily Taylor, playing everyone’s offspring. They support nicely and also stay discreetly in the background.
Onstage more than anyone else is musical director, Geoff Harvey. He’s an octogenarian these days and looks so very frail that one thinks he is just going to drop onto the keyboard, until he tinkles those ivories. Whacko. He keeps up a demanding musical accompaniment throughout the show and also, just for a bit of flair and virtuosity, he plays two substantial medleys.
Of course, it is John Wood and Max Gilles who steal the show. Both have magnificent voices. Max may have aged but his comic timing hasn’t. And, oh, it is so long since the State Theatre days when the magnificent Wood regularly graced our stage. He plays the naughty septuagenarian and he gets to tell some dire groan jokes. He’s on the ball and a generous performer and he does not refer to notes. The production, directed by Angus FitzSimons in a dignified, conservative style befitting the seniority of its stars, has been written by FitzSimons and his old radio/tv scriptwriting partner, Kevin Brumpton. One imagines they also wrote the program. It is a hoot and a very worthy free souvenir of a night of giggles and guffaws for all those early bird audience seniors who have probably forgotten all about it by now.
Samela Harris
When: 5 to 7 Feb
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: Closed
STARC Productions. Bakehouse Theatre. 24 Jan 2019
50 years ago, man landed on the moon and the musical Hair was encouraging people to drop out and get high and the philosophy of free love inspired open relationships.
Neil Simon’s 1969 three act take on this cultural moment, Last of The Red Hot Lovers, holds up extremely well today and not just because couples have been having affairs since forever. Simon’s writing seeks to understand how social forces shape this dynamic, bending and twisting primal humanity against social constructions of ‘faithful’ relationships.
What’s driving 23 years happily married Barney (Marc Clement), and the three women he initiates first meetings with in hope of starting an affair, to make such a move? Needing something new? Fear of missing out? Illicit thrills and spills?
Director Tony Knight deftly manages Simon’s magnificent three acts, each a rich, power packed playlet in its own right, while successfully developing the grand challenge of the piece - Barney’s slow, almost indistinguishable growing awareness of why he’s always seeking ‘something’ in another.
That imperceptible growth gradient comes into play thanks not just to three brilliantly written female characters on the page Barney encounters, but their fully realised social, emotional and sexual humanity in performance by Stefanie Rossi.
Elaine, Bobbi and Jeanette span the social spectrum of Barney’s lived world and desire/fantasy. They challenge it too. Because by meeting with Barney, they’re admitting to a need they feel compelled to action by. For different reasons. Reasons Barney has serious difficulties consciously acknowledging. None of these women have a problem with their choice to meet a married man in his Mothers’ apartment. Issues, yes. Honestly expressed. For Barney. In the too hard basket.
This conundrum is expressed in dialogue and performance with great gusto, humour and deep compassion.
Simon’s goal of uncovering and exploring the truly human, pained, impassioned and newly aware scope of relationship possibility/impossibility is profoundly rigorous, yet emotionally open. Marc Clement and Stefanie Rossi’s richly honest performance ensures this gets through to an audience.
Electric night at the theatre, almost three plays for one ticket experience.
David O’Brien
When: 23 Jan to 2 Feb
Where: The Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: bakehousetheatre.com