★★★★★
Adelaide Fringe. Lynn Preston/Every Old Sock Meets an Old Shoe/Storytelling Beyond Words Creative Lab. Migration Museum. 3 Mar 2023
One performer. A blanket. A chair. A very bare Yurt performance space.
Performer Lynn Preston’s storytelling performance is all on her own in this very bare space, suffice simple and deft lighting changes. The story is based on South American folktale La Llorona, transposed to Bundjalung Country, Northern Rivers New South Wales.
Preston conjures the very scent, physicality, spirit, rough and calm, in a story of a boy, a cursed young girl, a woodsmen and febrile, living, breathing bush land, forests and rivers with steely, deep, disciplined control.
The Cherry Scrub is a story of belonging to a place and its tragedies. Of becoming at one with it, in spite of competing, jealousy fuelled human demands, as becomes the case for the cursed young girl and the woodsmen she initially puts her sense of trust and safety in.
The land’s power is central to the tale. It seduces, comforts and confronts the cursed girl in tandem with the growing power of a curse within her as her two children come into being.
The poetry of Preston’s writing is as formidably potent as is her performance.
Preston fills the expansive space of The Yurt with very finely crafted characterisations, delivered with precise grace eliciting silent moments of pause which of themselves say so much more deeply about the inner heart and minds of her characters.
It is a powerfully captivating, electric 70 minutes in which Preston owns your breathless attention from start to finish.
David O’Brien
When: 2 to 5 Mar
Where: Migration Museum – The Yurt
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
