Presented by Offending Shadows. Tandanya Café. 24 Feb 2016.
This show has been positively received everywhere in the world it is performed, including in last year’s Adelaide Fringe. It’s easy to understand why, and it’s tempting – perhaps expected – to jump on the same bandwagon and add to the canon of rave reviews, but I won’t. Before explaining why, a little about the story.
Eleanor’s Story is an account of surviving World War II Nazi Germany. Not new I hear you say, but it has a twist. Eleanor Ramrath Garner is a young American girl who moves with her family from the USA in 1939 to Berlin to allow her father to take up desirable employment. Wrong place, wrong time. He intends them to stay only for two years but Hitler’s insanity puts an end to that, and they become involved in an increasingly desperate struggle to survive while all the time trying to escape, which they eventually do at the end of the war and return to state-side.
The story is actually a true one and is based on Garner’s autobiography. What makes the performance special is that her granddaughter, Ingrid Garner, performs it, and it is a one person show.
The whole thing is an emotional roller coaster, and the narrative is compelling. It is funny and sad. It is at times disturbing, and at other times it reassures us that decency and humanity survive the horrors of war. Ingrid Garner plays multiple characters – her brother, her parents, her school teacher – and importantly she plays her own character over a time span of some 5-6 years from an innocent girl to a budding young woman.
So, why don’t I rave about it? I enjoyed it very much and enthusiastically joined in the extended ovation at the end of the performance, but it could have been so much better. Fringe venues are notoriously Spartan in the facilities they offer, but this show demands a much more sympathetic lighting design and a larger stage. The performer was quite restricted in how she ‘took the stage’ and the few furniture properties were in fact too many. They became a distraction and although the idea behind their use was at times well thought out – such as placing a trunk on top of two chairs to create a hiding place in a cellar for shelter during an air raid – they could just have easily been dispensed with and lights (and sound) used to place the focus on the contorted body of a terrified child in fear of her life. The acoustics of the venue were also poor, and being seated on the mezzanine only added to the difficulties in clearly hearing the performer.
Ingrid Garner is clearly a talented actress, and I would have greatly enjoyed seeing her perform the piece free from the shackles of properties and a small stage so that she could extend her art and truly astound us.
This show is worth seeing.
Kym Clayton
When: 24 Feb to 12 Mar
Where: Tandanya Café
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
