★★★★1/2
Adelaide Fringe. The Courtyard of Curiosities. 5 Mar 2025
Christopher Samuel Carroll is a Canberra-based Irish actor, director, and playwright, and he is a master storyteller of the first order. His theatrical training credentials are impressive: he is a graduate of The Samuel Beckett Centre, Trinity College, Dublin, and of École Internationale du Théâtre Jacques Lecoq, Paris. The Canberra Critics’ Circle has described him as “the master of the solo performance” – ‘master’ is almost an understatement – and there are many one-person shows in the current Adelaide Fringe that could take a lesson from him.
The Cadaver Palaver: A Bennett Cooper Sullivan Adventure is, as the title suggests, an extraordinarily elaborate story about an audacious and intrepid (fictitious) gentleman adventurer that involves dead bodies (some of which have been dead for a very long time as it turns out!).
Carroll plays Bennett Cooper Sullivan, a Victorian gentleman, adventurer and Lothario, and for over an hour he recounts at breakneck speed a tale of dash at daring that takes him from Egypt to Edinburgh and to London’s West End. Without giving away any spoilers, it is sufficient to say that along the way he meets a range of exotic persons who both pleasure and pain him as he tries to get to unmask a mystery. Sullivan almost has fantastical powers, and he overcomes barriers in the most attention-grabbing ways. Disbelief at his antics is not just wilfully suspended, it is hung drawn and quartered! But the audience willingly goes along with it all and you can almost hear them saying to themselves “How’s he going to get out of this one?!”.
Carroll’s Lecoq training comes to the fore in the elegant and stylised way he hurls his body around the intimate acting space. Despite the rapid pace of the patter, his diction is flawless, and the text is deliciously Victorian, almost out of a Dickens novel. The piece might be criticised as being a little on the long side, but Christopher Samuel Carroll is a master of his craft, and we hang on his every word.
Kym Clayton
When: 5 to 9 Mar
Where: The Courtyard of Curiosities
Bookings: adelaidefringe.com.au
