Adelaide Festival. Bangarra Dance Theatre. 15 Mar 2018
Beauty followed by jolting, soul rendering disturbances forms the choreographic flow of Bennelong’s narrative.
Stephen Page’s careful management of very powerful, incisively direct movement, in partnership with Jacob Nash’s set and Steve Francis’s score achieves more in expressing the tragedy at the heart of the history of Woollarawarre Bennelong than any conventional history lesson.
Page and the ensemble have dug deep within themselves to create a work focused on the inner emotional workings of a traditional Eora man finding himself caught between two cultures, and responsibility to his people. Through their research they have surrendered themselves to finding and articulating in dance things within the heart and mind of Bennelong suggested in the historical record.
The end result is a work as much a celebration of a life and culture as it is a profoundly discerning, piercing investigation into what it costs to build bridges between two extremely apposite cultures, in which one of them has a significant advantage.
Beau Dean Riley Smith dances the role of Bennelong with extraordinary insight, layered with finely attuned, gripping psychological depth. He is powerfully supported by the ensemble in rich choreographic exposition of culture and community.
Bennelong’s story is one of negotiated conquest. In choreographic expression it’s made totally clear in subtly fused elements of First Nation dance with Europeans, as Bennelong and his people come under European influence. This engenders so many moments of powerful introspection between two cultures as they circle each other, interact, engage then reject things each cannot accept.
Bennelong’s stressed inner self and identity is always at the fore. The gradual tearing down of his self-worth, and allegiance to land and people, is a deeply sorrowful thing, but not one of meek submission in Smith’s bravura performance.
It is a loss for all, felt through the centuries since 1789.
Bangarra Dance Theatre has done a great and profoundly important service through their art by creating this work, which does more to reach into the heart of suffering in history, and offer a pathway to understanding and compassion through spirit in history, than dry words.
David O’Brien
When: 15 to 18 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: bass.net.au
By Amer Hlehel. Directed by Amir Nizar Zuabi. Adelaide Festival. Space Theatre. 15 Mar 2018
A square of white in a vast open black stage. A small bench. A black briefcase. One nondescript ageing man.
This is Taha in his speck of existence. He is a man the world did not want. He is Palestinian. He is a poet.
Amer Hlehel embodies Taha Muhammed Ali in 75 minutes of riveting monologue. Hlehel is a Palestinian actor, a man not only with the soul of the Palestinian predicament but with the training and technical artistry of a supreme story teller.
Thus does the poet take the audience from his extraordinarily ill-starred birth, to his relationship with a stoic mother and a crippled father, through his boyhood as a backyard entrepreneur, and through the fall of Palestine and the ensuing years in Lebanese camps.
He depicts a sweet and vulnerable lad who is driven to be a bread-winner and who is ever desperately seeking his father’s approval. He tells of Taha’s first exposure to the big wide world in a visit to Haifa where, away from his little strict Islamic village, he hears the voices and languages of an emancipated society. His excitement is infectious. He tells also of the Palestinian tradition of betrothal and how from boyhood onwards Taha loved that baby cousin who had been chosen for him. He tells of how it was for those who returned to their homeland from the refugee camp. His heartbreak is our heartbreak. Hlehel stands before us, a trembling old man recalling all the joys, disappointments, furies and ironies which lead to Taha’s evolution as one of the great poets of his people. The audience has fallen in love with this performance and rises to its feet in acclaim as Taha leaves the stage and Hlehel, suddenly fit and vigorous, the consummate actor, comes forth to take his bow.
Samela Harris
When: 15 to 18 Mar
Where: Space Theatre
Bookings: bass.net.au
Written and performed by Joanne Hartstone. Holden Street Theatres. 11 Mar 2018
She was born in Bowden to become one of history’s most colourful suffragettes. She is reborn in Hindmarsh to become one of the Fringe’s most celebrated figures - and clearly, with a long performance life ahead of her. Muriel Matters would be incredibly happy with this turn of events, for she has become the subject of the brilliant Joanne Hartstone’s latest one-woman show.
Hartstone, already one of the most lauded and awarded Fringe performers Adelaide has produced, has researched deep into Matters achievements with help from Frances Bedford, Adelaide’s doyen of all things Muriel Matters. While Bedford has kept Muriel Matters’ history alive, Hartstone has brought Muriel Matters to life.
It’s a huge and exhilarating performance.
Since Matters was, among her many accomplishments, an elocutionist, it takes an actress with serious vocal skills to take on her talents. Hartstone has the training and the vocal range to depict her with ease. Not only but also, Hartstone has the modulation range to take her subject through a lifespan from shrill girlish excitement through eloquent narration and into speechifying to the masses.
Muriel Matters (1877 - 1969) was also a journalist, a lecturer, a teacher and an actress. Most famously, she was to chain herself to the grille of the Ladies’ Gallery in the British House of Commons in a spectacularly successful stunt to gain attention for the Women’s Freedom League which protested against the oppression of women in a male-dominated society and which called for female suffrage. Matters' background as an Adelaide girl gave her the added oomph of early female suffrage in her home town.
Joanne Hartstone traces Matters’ life through this and all her other outstanding exploits, including her down times and her rather strange, ever-postponed romantic life. It’s a nice, thorough piece of bio theatre.
It’s also a high-energy performance. Hartstone, dressed in well-tailored period garb and with the Matters talismanic cameo at her throat, performs this work with an interesting set, carefully cluttered with desk and coat rack and books and suitcase. A big shipping trunk symbolises her travel between Australia and England. When opened, it rather surprisingly puffs up clouds of smoke which emphasise major historic points as well as giving the stage a lovely, soft, smoky aesthetic.
A little stand rolling silent movie-style captions cleverly supplies dates and dot points to the Matters career.
Hartstone is something of a darling Australian girl in her own right. She has evolved into one of the major figures of the Fringe world both as an entrepreneur curating her own mini Fringe in the city and Botanic Gardens, producing shows as well as creating outstanding solo pieces. Her The Girl Who Jumped Off The Hollywood Sign was showered with five-star reviews and “Best of” awards where ever it was presented in Australia and overseas.
That Daring Australian Girl is destined for the same path of acclaim.
Samela Harris
5 stars
When: 11 to 18 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres, The Arch
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Patch Theatre Company. AC Arts Main Theatre. 9 Mar 2018
There’s a delicious promise of suggestive magic in asking, “can you hear colour?” Yet sometimes it’s a little dispiriting if the person who can hear colour, finds asking if others can too puts them totally off side with the whole world.
This simple premise; breaking through communication barriers, connecting to feelings, and sharing extraordinary sensations, is explored with an honest and fiercely direct, child-like delight. All approved by spell bound children seated at the front of the space.
Naomi Edwards’ direction renders highly complex experiential sensory concepts involving light, sound and vision, instantly comprehendible in a passionate production centred on Michaela Burger’s deeply beautiful, heartfelt performance as the girl with that special gift.
Composer Alan John’s score for clarinet, violin and trumpet is not his only contribution. He adds an engaging, lightly comic performance as a pugnacious hunter of colour and sound that the Girl discovers in bright feathers, littering Kathryn Sproul’s gentle off white cloth set with tree trunk.
Edwards’ fusion of sensory elements depends on a successful lighting design, and Ben Flett delivers the magic with seemingly audacious simplicity, bringing full emotional life to the Girl’s description of each colour’s emotional sound. Binding all these things together is Bethany Hill’s performance as the beautiful Song Bird of the Rainbow.
No mere song utters forth, but the emotionally joyous power of operatic phrase and aria from and the Girl and Bird in celebration of seeing, hearing and feeling colour.
David O’Brien
When: 2 to 18 Mar
Where: AC Arts Main Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Toneelgroep Amsterdam. William Shakespeare. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Festival Theatre. 10 Mar 2018
Foolish are we to associate the word “royal” with nobility, glamour and privilege.
As the Dutch Toneelgroep theatre company ropes Shakespeare’s king plays together, it is to remind us for once and for all that the Royal Houses of English history are an ugliness of ruthless ambition and power politics.
Their Kings of War production, a breathtaking centrepiece to the Adelaide Festival 2018, is an epic saga of unadulterated regal awfulness. From five of Shakespeare’s plays, it focuses on kings Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III and the machinations not only of their ruling eras but of the dukes and earls and cousins and the seething pits of conspiracy and ambition of the royal courts of yore.
Toneelgroep places these plays in a contemporary landscape upon a massive open-plan set which features bleak corridors leading behind the scenes to power-plays, deaths and vignettes of loss. Onstage centre is a giant screen on which happenings on and off stage are depicted. There’s a cameraman amid the action a lot of the time and his images loom large on the screen. Sometimes there’s a mystery of where on earth is the camera? The film images keep coming. The camera tracks deaths of kings behind the scenes, always laid out in white on a hospital gurney emphasising the great anonymising equaliser of death.
The kings and their court are in modern garb - the same dark suits and ties which define male power today. This underscores the grim reality that, while the nature of wars and political sabotage may have changed some, the essence of their loathsome power games has gone on and on and the perpetrators notoriously are male. These Kings of War are long dead but new kings of war are out there now.
Hello Trump. Hello Putin. Indeed, in a rare light moment, Richard III takes a break to give them a quick tingle on his royal telephones.
The staging itself is clever. There’s a war room in one corner. Another one is over there. There are musicians boxed aloft to sound horns of war and pomp and mourning. There’s a bed which is a royal chamber or barracks, there are war maps and, as scenes and periods move on, there are war tables and lounge settings. And, of course, most importantly, there are the surtitle screens - one over the video screen and another above the stage itself because the actors are speaking in Dutch.
This makes the four and a half hours gripping not only in terms of the action evolving onstage but because the audience must be reading very swiftly and at the same time watching the players, most of whom are look-alike men in suits. It requires quite intense concentration.
Of course, there are women in the plays too. They are high-born but also chattels of political power. Henry V might be besotted by Katharina but it is her father, France’s King Charles, who decides her marital fate as a tool of national diplomacy.
The wooing of Katharina is one of the sweet moments of the production. It’s a lovely piece of gruff romantic ineptitude by Ramsay Nasr as Henry; a bit of language comedy. And in positive terms, it symbolises two royal houses seeking peace after the ravages of war, of kings healing wounds for the sake of their people.
The modern war reportage style employed by the production works brilliantly; its showing of Henry V’s incursions into France have particular impact. The maps are projected onto the screen and one sees the Battle of Agincourt as if on CNN. The audience gasps as the death toll is posted: 10,000 French, 112 English. The descriptions of the battles are graphic. Put your babies on spikes. Fighting men tired and dirty. And amid it, bursts of Shakespearean thought, philosophising the tragedy and cruelty of war, and delivering chilling sentiments in exquisite poetic expression.
While the liberties in the adaptation of these Shakespeare plays are legion, not to mention that it is spoken in that wildly guttural other language, director Ivo van Hove has retained a sense of integrity for the beauty of the Bard’s use of English.
Henry V dies young of dysentery just after he produces an heir and that baby is raised by the court and a regent. He takes the throne the moment he is old enough but he is never mature enough. Eelco Smits plays young Henry VI as a poor, nerdy, insecure weakling. His grief over the murderous death of "Uncle Gloucester” is heart-rending. He has violent fits and is inconsolable. While the squabbling wheelers and dealers of his Royal court run the show over his head, he takes support from prayer. Poor little Plantagenet.
Richard III is played by Hans Kesting, and oh, how masterfully. In this production his disfigurement is a dramatic port wine stain across his face and an awkward gait. Cursed “by dissembling nature”, he says.
It may be the winter of his discontent, but his royal court has been modernised and has Persian rugs, couches and plants. The household views the world on the television and eats jam tart. And there is another surprise show-stopper scene - the silent eating of the very tough tart.
The murderous world goes on. The princes toddle off to the tower. The music moves from horns to DJ effects to a counter tenor singing solo to thunderous rumbles and mad metronome. “Where will it end,” it choruses. The soundscape is as striking and original as the mounting of the work.
And Richard, reviled, devious Richard, goes mad and bounds around. “My kingdom for a horse”. The royal world is bedlam.
Kesting’s portrayal of Richard is endlessly interesting and, thanks to the close-ups enabled by the camera work, the audience can see right into his eyes as he talks to himself in the mirror. One shares in his self-pity and self-hatred.
Toneelgroep brought us the sensational Roman Tragedies in 2014, an epic about which people continue in their effusive praise. Kings of War is not on its vast scale but it is nonetheless an extraordinary feat of theatre.
It is another of those very special theatrical experiences for which we love and thank our Festival of Arts from the bottom of our hearts.
Samela Harris
When: 10 to 13 Mar
Where: Festival Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au