Adelaide Festival. Dunstan Playhouse. 13 Mar 2025
For the first five minutes or so, there’s a sense of expectation, even trepidation, from the opening night audience. It feels a touch undone, a little earnest, a little anxious. We watch each other on the full, stage-wide screen as we enter the auditorium, our mirrored selves sitting and settling, looking curiously at the almost bare stage.
From the rear of the auditorium, a man appears, playing drums on a large plastic tub. As he descends the stairs, he invites others to play. So, no fourth wall here! Introducing himself as Rwandan busker Jean-Benoit (Rashidi Edward), our journey through the love stories of a random sample of Brisbanites begins.
During Covid (how that period has become a touchstone in our lives!) Trent Dalton, journalist and author, sat himself down on the corner of Adelaide and Albert Streets in Brisbane with a sky-blue Olivetti typewriter. ‘Can you tell me a love story?’ he asked the passersby. And enough of them did to populate a new book, simply titled Love Stories.
That book has now been adapted for stage by Tim McGarry with Director and Dramaturg Sam Strong. Dalton wrote additional linking text with his partner Fiona Franzmann, referencing their own love story, and what they have presented us with is nothing short of wonderful. It is a gem.
Husband and Wife (Jason Klarwein and Michala Banas representing Dalton and Franzmann) are the link between all the disparate stories, with Jean-Benoit asking the questions that pushes the narrative along. As these characters settle into place, so too does the audience and before long all are keenly awaiting the next story, the next laugh, the next anguish, the next tears.
The sparseness of Renee Mulder’s set is the perfect foil as characters talk, laugh, cry and most delightfully, dance. The screen which takes up the entire stage rear is constantly in use, for anecdotes, long shots, swirling action sequences... Choreographer Nerida Matthaei moves the ensemble around the stage, marrying effortlessly with the live feed camera operator (Craig Wilkinson), and at times we almost feel we are seeing a modern dance production. The use of immediate and on-the-spot digital technology has allowed this new capability to be entertained on the stage; you might at times think of it as ‘nose hair cam’. Ben Hughes lighting design adds immeasurably to the calming of what at times becomes quite chaotic, occasionally too much so.
Love is, as Wife tells Husband, ‘Messy’. And the whole messy thing is laid bare here, each vignette describing in sometimes painful detail the experiences of true love, bad love, lost love, desperate, unrequited and joyful love. The ensemble works beautifully together, inhabiting various and disparate characters working through the vagaries of love.
These are the stories of us. There are half a dozen major vignettes which unfold in the hundred minutes. There is nothing shocking or alien to these tales; we recognise them as ours, as our family’s, as our friends’. There’s a universality to it all, and the many characters played by a handful of actors show this most clearly, yet it’s a testament to the writing that the individuality shines through. And it just makes you want to fall in love again.
Arna Eyers-White
When: 13 to 16 Mar
Where: Dunstan Playhouse
Bookings: adelaidefestival.com.au
