★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Ben Roberts. Grace Emily Hotel. 29 Feb 2024
During this performance, Ben Roberts notes that he primarily performs original music, and that you won’t usually find him performing covers outside the Fringe. But occasionally, he enjoys a deep dive into his favourite albums, and Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska is one of these.
The audience on this night is clearly happy that he has decided to showcase this album; bar for enthusiastic applause at the end of each song, the intimate space of the Grace Emily is almost pin-drop quiet during the performance.
Nebraska is an oddity in Springsteen’s career, it was made in 1982 post the incredibly successful ‘The River’ tour. As Roberts explains, he recorded a bunch of songs on a four-track recorder, playing all the instruments, including backing vocals. But when he took it to the E-Street band, they pushed most of it back and told him to release it himself. The result is this stripped back, raw collection of songs, with the title song a re-telling of the Badlands killing spree of Charlie Starweather, when 11 people were murdered by Charlie and his 14 year old girlfriend. Roberts added laconically that the death toll would grow exponentially by the show’s end.
Roberts presented this show for the first time in 2023, and for this production he’s gone beyond Nebraska and added some favourites from the Springsteen canon. He opens with Factory from Darkness On The Edge Of Town, which reflects the bleak despair of the elder Springsteen’s working life, a theme to be returned to on Nebraska.
The title song follows, then Atlantic City gets an almost hoedown treatment in parts, with Roberts demonstrating his virtuosity on the ukulele, pulling sounds that non-uke fans would find surprising and quite remarkable. After Mansion On The Hill, which again has Springsteen directing his gaze to the gulf between the haves and have-nots, Roberts brings out I’m On Fire (Born In The USA) before diving back to Nebraska and upping the body count with Johnny 99 and Highway Patrolman. Some very fancy fretwork comes with State Trooper, and the audience members applaud as he starts into the oh-so-familiar but stripped back Dancing In The Dark.
While the added songs inject a bit of light into the dark stories that are Nebraska, it is still the songs from that album that cut the deepest, and Roberts has developed this production into a masterful performance. A minor quibble is the sound where the bass is too loud at times, vibrating through the (thankfully provided) chair, but as a one man band, Ben Roberts presents a brilliant performance of storytelling, songs and impresario uke playing. What a deep dive.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 29 Feb to 14 Mar
Where: Grace Emily Hotel
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 29 Feb 2024
In a sparsely-furnished, grey-walled room, a family sits around a glowing television. A woman slumbers in the double bed. A man folds clothes. The tinny sound of the tv bounces around the room. Dogs bark, traffic hoots and rumbles. The familial rhythms lull us into quiet observation. But gently, almost imperceptibly, the quotidian calm begins to vibrate with uncertainty. A black woman appears at the window, singing, a woman cries loudly then retreats into soft weeping.
A cabinet is wheeled to centre stage. It opens to reveal the lifeless, naked body of a young woman. The family gathers around her, smearing her with soil, then lifting her body centre stage, where she is washed, clothed in her unworn wedding dress, and surrounded by flowers. From here, we watch the family cycle through rituals of death and sorrow, some intimate, some solitary, some raw and scarifying.
Greek-Albanian director and creator Mario Banushi’s astonishingly assured second production meditates on the spinning, battling contradictions of grief. Inspired by deaths within his immediate family, Goodbye, Lindita is a profound and muscular insight into the unpredictability and elusive nature of sadness. It soothes and unsettles us. The piece is entirely wordless, constructed with progressing tableaux, as the emotional pitch of the performance shifts disconcertingly into turmoil and moments of chaos.
Banushi is assisted by a mesmerising score and sound design (by Emmanouel Rovithis), that moves from urban soundscape, through folk singing, to grating, buzzing interjections of noise. The sound tracks the changing emotional pitch of the scenes with brilliant effect. The lighting, too, (by Tasos Palaioroutas) is evocative: by turns murky, soft, and amber-hued like a Renaissance painting, bright and direct, and swirling mysteriously through fog.
The performance, at just over an hour’s duration, is perfectly paced, moving from modest, almost dull action into something monumental and emotionally jarring.
The scenes are precisely crafted and observed with unerring accuracy and compassion. That said, despite the undoubted meticulous creative process, there is no sense of artifice – it feels natural and organic. The images are both beautiful and confronting. There are moments of gentle intimacy – the family clustered around the television with the silent corpse, a belly-laugh coinciding with another’s wail of pain, and the exquisitely confronting washing of the naked corpse. Equally, we see moments of almost pagan turmoil, as the sisters shed their clothes and convulse in a frenzy. The spiritual world is near, but obscure: a black Madonna icon on the wall gives way to a portal to the unknown, a disembodied hand reaches through a wall to give comfort.
This is a beautiful, moving and powerful highlight of the Festival program.
John Wells
When: 29 Feb to 3 Mar 2024
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
Adelaide Festival. State Theatre Company South Australia and Celsus in association with Adelaide Festival present a Belvoir St Theatre Production. Scott Theatre. 28 Feb 2024
Blue is a palpable one-actor play about a young man’s loss of family following tragic events, his ensuing grief, and his inspiring resilience. The young man is Mark, and he is very capably played by Callan Purcell. It is a sad, affecting, and at times humorous story. Although the main subject material is harrowing and not new, the sequence of events in the arc of Mark’s story, written by award winning actor and writer Thomas Weatherall, is novel and its telling is fresh.
Mark is a writer, and so when he tells his story, he inevitably delves into detail and luxuriates in words. From an audience perspective, this can be quite distracting because, like Mark, we can become more interested in the detail than the events that are being described. It is interesting that Weatherall should make his character a writer and then foreground the subliminal processes that writers go through as a significant part of the play’s narrative. In some ways, it detracts from the play itself and places considerable extra demands on the actor, and the audience who must listen very carefully and apply heightened concentration. It’s not an easy theatre experience to enjoy, but perhaps this is part of Weatherall’s intention.
Because the play was performed in the Scott Theatre, with its unforgiving acoustic, Purcell’s vocal clarity was often compromised which forced the audience to listen ever so carefully, and the use of floor level microphones did little to address the problem. The text was therefore carefully scrutinised. (Adelaide so desperately needs additional quality performance spaces.)
The set design (attributed to Jacob Nash and Cris Baldwin) is evocative, empathetic, and stylised. It is one of the highlights of the production. It comprises a slightly raised semi-oval shaped stage connected seamlessly to a curving similarly shaped wall. The whole thing looks like a giant opened bivalve mollusc, and it is made of a textured material that is ashen white upon which projections of seascapes and other images can be projected. The play’s title Blue is a nod to the ocean, but also to clinical depression, both of which are of critical importance to the plot line. At one point, the actor removes floor panels to expose a shallow pool of water under the raised acting area, which he then wades into and uses to underscore crucial moments in the plot.
The success of the set is contingent on the superlative lighting design by Chloe Ogilvie. It is truly outstanding in the way it supports and moves with the narrative and Mark’s mood and state of mind. Wil Hugh’s excellent sound design also adds gravitas and lightness as the text requires.
The staging is simple, with very few stage properties in use. The focus is squarely on the actor and the story line. The play runs a full eighty minutes, and actor Callan Purcell never falters in engaging the audience and maintaining an appropriate pace. As previously mentioned, the side stepping into detail occasionally deflects the momentum and Purcell works diligently to minimise the issue. Director Deborah Brown ensures Purcell uses the full capability of the stage, including partially stepping up the rear wall (and dipping back down) that gives the impression of life and circumstances bearing down on Mark.
This is another quality presentation from State Theatre, of what is a Belvoir St Theatre production.
Kym Clayton
When: 28 Feb to 16 Mar
Where: Scott Theatre
Bookings: statetheatrecompany.com.au
★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. The Vault at Fools Paradise. 27 Feb 2024
It is the hottest day of the Fringe for this year, and we are in a plastic terrarium pretending to be a dome named – for some unknown reason – The Vault. The dim light used in The Vault (I’ve now seen 3 shows in this venue) sometimes detracts from the sheer power and athleticism of this show; two men and three women are showing virtuosity in their use of simple. Individual performance tumbles into teamwork, the groups move fluidly from one routine to another, and I find out later the cast of Apricity didn’t even get a technical rehearsal due to the heat.
Increasingly, they are playing with fire, quite literally as they work with cupped candles, then take on the metal rings for suspended acrobatic work. Perhaps for the first time the lighting is fully adequate, and the music completes the vignette, Moses Sumney’s Doomed providing an ethereal and moody aural backdrop.
As I hear this, and make note of it, an act which most nearly resembles the Whirling Dervishes routine unfolds on the stage, accompanied by one of the many versions of the absurdly catchy Yeh! Yeh!, on this occasion from los 3 sudamericanos. In some small way it made sense.
This is a show of proficiency and skill, of grace and acrobatics where the apparatus is less important than the performers’ ability to show mastery of it. It is a performance of strength and precision. It is engaging, but I’d love to be able to see more, particularly of the early part of the performance, it engages with the audience and takes them into the heart of the action but does not pander to crassness as other shows may do. It is, in all respects, outstanding.
As an aside I note that following the ravages of Covid, the Fringe has an opportunity to reclaim and reposition itself. For the first time in many years standup comedians are not in the majority, and the Fringe has become the haunt of burlesque and acrobats and of itinerant jugglers. It is much the better for this; it becomes much more the people’s festival, lively and engaged in guilty pleasures rather than allowing too many touring comics to drain the local economy.
Alex Wheaton
When: 27 Feb to 3 Mar
Where: The Vault at Fools Paradise
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Head First Acrobats. The Vault, Fool’s Paradise. 27 Feb 2024
Money, money, money. The audience is showered with the stuff – oh that it were real! Still, we’re easily distracted by other shiny things as the cowboys strut their stuff in this Railed wild west bar-room. To the sweet banjo grind of Hugo’s 99 Problems, a testosterone storm explodes on stage as the boys start drinking, carousing, fighting and producing some great acrobatic work.
This is the crew who also brought us Godz, and its ‘brother’ show does not disappoint. While Railed also features juggling, the spinning wheel and some fine acrobatics, it takes things up a notch and at the same time camps it up outrageously. There’s some very sexy horse action: an R-rated tryst with a unicorn (!) and a pommel horse exhibition that was worth the price of admission. The floor gymnastics, while a little hard to see on the raised stage, were executed with great timing, and a lot of laughs. There’s a bottles-on-the-bar routine that just has one waiting for the smashing of glass – and it doesn’t happen!
This show is knock-down drag-‘em-out funny. The slo-mo fight scene is a classic, while the card trick becomes a recurring motif between the aerial ropes, the see-saw, the chair tower and the flying knives. Yep, this has it all, including an outstandingly curated music soundtrack: Reignwolf’s Are You Satisfied; Ginuwine’s Pony and The Black Key’s Lonely Boy amongst them.
The laughs come thick and fast, but never obscure the remarkable physical talents of this cast; the combination of hilarity and skill is a killer – prepare to be slayed – or is that giving away the ending?
Arna Eyers-White
When: 27 Feb to 17 Mar
Where: The Vault, Fool’s Paradise
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au