Lost In Translation. Live at 5, William Margery Room, Adelaide Oval. 10 Mar 2017
Lost in Translation is Nick Fagan's vehicle for getting himself on stage. Judging by the company's first three productions including this one, Fagan has a knack for finding new high quality American plays never seen before in South Australia that involve hardboiled persons on the lower rung of the ladder of opportunity struggling with making sense of life - including their crimes and misdemeanours - with a whiff of violence or a bit of biff. The Motherf**ker With The Hat is a terribly amusing modern day farce penned by Stephen Adly Guirgis, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2015.
This is my new best show of the Fringe. Jackie returns from prison in upstate New York to the bed of Veronica, his sweetheart since Grade 8. But Jackie suspects that the motherf**cker with the hat beat him to it. He seeks anger management counselling from his parole officer, who, while he has drawn a line under his druggie past, has the moral compass of Tiger Woods. The dialogue is snappy-fast, funny and ironic, and full of New York - with more ** than stars in the sky.
Co-directors Matt Houston and Fagan have assembled a terrific cast that has crafted characters of recognised type yet are highly individualised. Fagan's Jackie is anxiously restless, struggling to break free from recidivism, yet is sweetly honest in his relationships. His angst is contrasted with Patrick Gibson's calm new age smugness as the counsellor, Ralph, and between them we see the play deepen from farce into a duel on moral relativism.
Rosie Williams is wonderful as Veronica - drug-addled and shrill but clear thinking enough to know what she wants. Ralph's wife sees the writing on the wall and her situation is very effectively and warmly channelled by Lana Adamuszek. Jackie seeks help from cousin Julio - David Salter's faux-Mexican makes this role a risible standout.
The Motherf**ker With The Hat is a ripper black comedy with a life-coaching bent. You might learn something while you're laughing. Bravo!
P.S. It's on for only one more night - Saturday March 11 - and I would not miss it!
David Grybowski
When: 10 to 11 Mar
Where: Live at 5, William Margery Room, Adelaide Oval
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Ruth Hollows. Holden Street Theatres. 9 Mar 2017
This is a 30 minute gem of a play by Claudia Osborne and Thomas De Angelis of the Sydney area, or thereabouts, and directed by Osborne. Wally, played with aching insecurity by Sam Brewer, reluctantly attends a party with his spunky housemates - or at least I thought they were housemates - created by Charlie Devenport and Grace Victoria. (I hope I got that right because for the first time in my experience, the program did not identify the actors.)
Wally isn't in the party mood - he just wants to be left alone - and his downward spiral toward anxious withdrawal is reinforced each time his mates ask, "Are you alright?" He is so much like myself, I was astonished. Sometimes at a party, I just want to disappear underneath the wallpaper.
A rather simple tale is superbly augmented by Daniel Harris's animation comprising back projection designed to interact with the performers, and with hugely enjoyable shadow play.
There is an enchanting scene where shrinking violet, Wally shifts to bug size and meets up with a couple of praying mantises urging him to return to the party and get off the grass. Bravo!
A delightful Fringe surprise that put a smile on my dial from go to whoa. Go see!
David Grybowski
When: 9 to 11 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Fringe. Bakehouse Theatre. 9 Mar 2017
Playing an Edwardian lad in industrial Newport, South Wales, Daniel Llewelyn-Williams steps onto the stage rugged up in a heavy woollen suit and swaddled in a great big neck scarf. It is to the immense credit of his dramatic skills that he did not once for a minute appear to be hot working under lights on a warm night in the confined quarters of the Bakehouse Theatre. Sleeveless summery audience members, however, started to sweat just looking at his attire.
Llewelyn-Williams brings this solo piece to the Fringe under the Guy Masterson umbrella - which, for experienced Adelaide audiences, is a strong assurance it will be a quality piece.
And it is.
Llewelyn-Williams is appealing on many levels. The story he brings is of a kid living in poverty in dismal docklands. He seeks nothing more than his father’s approval while knowing that his covert obsession with becoming a magician would devastate his dad for whom a grim labouring job is a respectable achievement. Thus does the boy describe his life and demonstrate his growing prowess at the art of magic, referring to the great Houdini's as the apex of all illusionist achievements.
The lad grows up as we watch. He tells of his dreams and fears. He tells of his hope to impress against the odds with an impossible feat. Audience members hold their breath as the narrative becomes more graphic and frightening.
The performer has us in his spell.
And suddenly an hour has gone and we have been treated to yet another brilliant piece of Fringe theatre.
Samela Harris
When: 9 to 18 Mar
Where: Bakehouse Theatre
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
Adelaide Festival. Restless Dance Theatre. Hilton Hotel. 7 Mar 2017
Restless Dance Theatre’s Michelle Ryan and company have created an extraordinary, technically sophisticated spartan work as truly intimate as the onsite production venue, Adelaide’s Hilton Hotel is gargantuan and imposing.
Intimate Space is a unique journey for a very small audience in which distinctly eye grabbing, against-the-grain, physicality draws the audience closer and closer into a relationship with characters operating a lot like those from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The only difference being, there is no quixotic madness at hand, rather, a deft, almost mystic series of experiences, some gentle in transition of space and emotional timbre, some like a lightning strike shock.
Little things like checking in, the delightful concierge asks which of a selection of lovely personality types you might be checked in as; an attention holding bell hop who’s very uniform holds secrets you find with a magnifying glass; a whippy bodied bell hop who guides the guests on their journey’s beginning; the explosive, fluoro lit white costumed dance in the industrial laundry.
The shifts in place, mood and choreography are endless, and fascinating. Intimate Space achieves something significant, especially within the public spaces of the venue, best summed up in the delightful pair of couples who dance a deftly modified classical form pairing. The contrast of young dancers with and without a disability giving life to a performed expression of emotional intimacy publicly, contrasts with the humorous, nonetheless perceptive, realisation of what it is to be hidden away in basement laundries and industrial kitchens. As signs pointed out make clear though, you never know whose watching.
Such beauty, warmth and uniqueness is gifted in this work.
David O’Brien
When: 3 to 18 March
Where: Hilton Hotel, Adelaide
Bookings: Sold Out
Adelaide Festival. Complicite. Dunstan Playhouse. 7 Mar 2017
Richard Katz’s voice travels round and round in one’s head beneath the headphones. Is he behind me? Ooh, he is blowing in my ear. My ear feels hot. How could it?
It is a perceptional illusion. A trick of the mind. An alternative reality. And what is reality, anyway?
Katz riffs on existentialism moving around the stage which is his London studio. The vast sound-absorbing foam baffle curtain stands behind him. A binaural head stands before him. His five-year-old daughter comes and goes in sound bites we are hearing through our headphones. He’s babysitting. She does not want to go to sleep.
But, he has a story to tell.
There is a table with more microphones, a chair and a lot of plastic water bottles. He introduces the deep American voice of the protagonist, Loren McIntyre, the National Geographic photojournalist who is taken to the Brazilian Amazon to find and record the mysterious Mayoruna tribe. The story begins. Just Katz on stage and us under our headphones. One on one. Five hundred of us... It feels like a radio play on steroids. A boat plane over the river. Sound effects. Voices. Jungle.
Things do not go to plan. Loren follows the tribe into a strange half-village, half-world. He is not a prisoner. Or, is he?
Only the head man can communicate, but it is telepathic. The American is sceptical. Village life, tribal plans, white invaders, the jungle, flesh-eating maggots… The set is dark. There is just Katz up on stage, running around in the dark talking, gesticulating, adding his voice to the layered soundscape which is filling our brains. There is no other reality.
The story unfolds. It is scary and gruesome and yet wonderful. Strange substances are consumed. Altered states. One thinks of Carlos Castenada and The Teachings of Don Juan. Eek he is now licking a psychedelic frog. Loren’s predicament is extreme. Katz, meanwhile, is still babysitting in London.
The two worlds whiz by all contained between the ears.
The sound quality is excellent. The sound technology is superb. The performance is almost superhuman.
This is Simon McBurney’s Complicite. His production is based on a book, Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu. The book is based on a true story.
It makes for a profoundly different experience, a truly Festival-worthy experience which comes in through the ears and imprints upon the mind’s eye.
Samela Harris
When: 7 to 11 Mar
Where: Dunstan Plahouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au