★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. Ruby’s at Holden Street Theatres. Presented by Janet Swain.
If this isn’t the smallest theatre in the Fringe, it’s running a close second to wherever the first is! A dozen or so seats fill the intimate space, with j-u-s-t enough room for an electric keyboard and a couple of props. Definitely not a chip packet kind of place.
This is Janet Swain’s first solo show – she references her cabaret band The Loveys, later in the piece. But this is hers, and what a triumph it is. This is what a Fringe show should be, through and through.
It can be just as difficult to capture a small space as a large one, and Swain accomplishes this with ease. Looking her audience in the eye, she takes us through a 14 year-old’s pain and anguish of being ‘forced’ by her mother to play the bassoon, and an abandoned bassoon at that. The bassoon (in French le basson; Italian il fagotto; German das fagott, as we are reminded often) is the forgotten instrument, and as Swain points out in one of her original songs, in an orchestra it is way up the back, just behind the flutes.
Studying via a scholarship in the endangered instruments program, Swain endures the indignity of it all, revealing her passion for cello, and her unrequited love for the cellist, Jaqueline Dupree. Ah what could have been, had she not been a bassoonist!
After failing an exam, Swain leaves the instrument in her mother’s shed, where it remains for 32 years. In finding it again, Swain also discovers her grandmother’s mementos, and uncovers her passion for singing as a young woman in the church choir and touring musical company, with “rehearsals twice a week”. Delphi Coral was her Revlon lipstick of choice and Swain takes it as her nom de guerre.
Swain uses original songs in the telling of these stories, and the passion of her grandmother’s regret, - the tragedy of the choices made by the middle aged house-wife, the lost opportunities - shines through her performance. She is expressive – funny, sad, yearning, circumspect, joyful – and showcases each of these through her original songs, played gently on piano with a couple of raucous bassoon solos tossed in!
As befits the space, lighting is minimal and the sound is just right for the room.
It all appears to work out well in the end, in the way that a well told story of great personal significance should. Grandmother’s torch is carried on and the unappreciated bassoon makes it into a cabaret band. Mother would be proud. As should Janet Swain be.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 27 Feb to 12 Mar
Where: Holden Street Theatres
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
