1990 Adelaide Festival
Murray Bramwell

Reviewing an arts festival is a bit like being locked up in a sweet shop. You can savour only so many creams, crunches, pralines and truffles before a drowsy numbness pains the sense and the pancreas tires of life. The effect of this kind of exquisite burn-out can be that you mistake satiety for dissatisfaction and blame Clifford Hocking for it.

There have already been harsh exchanges about the jaded responses of local reviewers and I don’t want to re-open old saws. But it is pertinent to acknowledge that reviewers have a privileged overview of the festival and it is important to be judicious and avoid shallow ungenerosities. Often complimentaries can make us uncomplimentary.

With a programme the size of the Adelaide Festival most people -that is, the ones who buy their own tickets -have to choose one or two, at most a cluster of events and hope that these will turn out to be the juiciest plums. But what do you base this choice on ? It might be the Munchausen prose and enticing photography of the festival booklet, or recognition of favourite works and familiar artists. Others may decide on strict party lines for music, theatre or dance. Whatever the strategy, people hope- some with exaggerated expectations others with uncritical ones- that their particular festival will be an exceptional experience.

The festival’s theatre programme had some pitfalls for those who followed the classical ticket only. The Abbey’s Shadow of the Gunman for instance was an airless experience – a theatrical equivalent of cryonics. Presented with the full solemnities of fourth wall naturalism, Ben Barnes production of the least substantial of O’Casey’s Dublin trilogy was faithful unto death with its wax matches and blotting paper but the context of the play has vastly changed since 1926.

In first performance the O’Casey plays had the impact and importance of Lawler’s Doll in this country. But with their political prevarication and the presentation of Irish men as the celtic equivalent of Rastus and women as martyred and long-suffering mammie, these plays now largely serve reactionary ends. Watching this production Margaret Thatcher and her policy makers could feel vindicated. That said, Garrett Keogh’s Davoren and Johnny Murphy as Seamus Shields were spirited, precise performances and the work still has its moments as melodrama. Nevertheless, it is a pity that the Abbey, significant in the history of world theatre, should be touring a fossil.

The much-heralded Yuri Lyubimov Hamlet performed by the Leicester Haymarket theatre was not just a disappointment, it was a dud. Both in concept and performance it was severely deficient and it will be unfortunate if it is seen, especially by young audiences, as indicative of current trends and standards in Shakespearean staging. One can only lament once more that the English Shakespeare Company’s Wars of the Roses were fought for so few when they were performed in Adelaide in late 1988. They would have made a sensational centrepiece for a festival.

The Georgian Film Actors Studio also came on a wave of expectation, particularly since their parent company the Rustavellis left festival audiences in 1986 with such a provocative barrage of after-images. The Film Actors’ Don Juan took some adjustments which not all were prepared to make. The reading of Moliere’s sometimes cryptic figure of vice seemed breezily whimsical on the gender issue in particular although there are astonishing performances by Zurab Kiphidze as the suavely flowing Don, Amiran Amiranashvili as Sganarelle and Laura Rekhviashvili as the Prompt, a frame device introduced by director Michail Tumanishvili to provide an intriguing reminder that Don Juan is not only a play, he is also only an actor.

Bacula’s Pig, performed just three times in the final weekend of the festival, was a more satisfying production. Based on a short story written in 1912 by David Kldiashvili it concerns Galaktion, a peasant whose family is being driven bonkers by the neighbour Bacula’s marauding pigs. Getting no help from the council he decides to intimidate Bacula by ostentatiously inviting local officials for a feast. Ramez Ioseliani plays Galaktion with splendid poise and pathos given powerful support from Laura Rekhviashvili as his exasperated wife. The leads from Don Juan -Kipshidze and Amiranashvili- both provide brilliant comic detail in the feast scene in particular where the ensemble performance reminded us of the Rustavellis at their finest.

Bacula’s Pig with its themes of civic corruption and the helplessness of individuals- except as anonymous informers – has sharp implications for Soviet society before glasnost. The Georgians particularly through their theatre and anti-Stalinist films such as Repentance, had courageously found metaphors for dissent when dissent was impossible. It has been noted that now with the open declaration of a civil rights movement the Russian theatre has all but collapsed- having found covert and indirect forms it has now been superseded by direct action. The Georgians, abroad for several years with this gentle repertoire, will no doubt be returning to forge new forms for new circumstances.

The State Theatre’s choice of the Peter Weiss classic The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade could have been fraught with problems. The play is almost plagued by legendary status after memorable European productions and Peter Brook’s 1964 RSC version famous for putting a tiger in Britain’s theatrical tank. The film was widely seen and for many, Marat/Sade became a sixties icon, the barricade person’s Hair.

Director Simon Phillips and music director Ian MacDonald have proven that this fine play has not been lost to mythology, or become so circumscribed by time and place that people think it’s old chapeau. The politics of the Terror, like those of post-Ceausescu Rumania, are revolution’s bad dream and the split between the abstract idealism of Marat and the amoral sensualism of de Sade seems even more plainly the the schism which sunders us culturally and individually. This play surely one of the best in the past thirty years is still having its day.

Under Phillips’ direction, the performers provide sharp, intelligent theatre- notably Geoffrey Rush as Marat, Jane Menelaus as Corday and Bob Hornery’s haughty but fleshy de Sade. McDonald’s music does justice to Richard Peaslee’s great score and although Shaun Gurton’s design is a bit too Persil white of costume and tile it does add contemporary obsession to its meaning. In all, State has done well -Phillips will not please those who want theatre rougher or those who want it more genteel, but the festival was a courageous time to test his audience and first up he has shown his considerable theatrical ability.

Local company Red Shed’s Frankenstein’s Children ( written by Shed member David Carlin and directed by Tim Maddock), also stood up well alongside other festival offerings. A tale exhumed from the Victorian dreadfuls and the history of the Burke and Hare murders, the play recounts the practice of robbing graves to increase the body of 19th century medical knowledge. Complete with crimes , songs and a few jokes, Carlin’s dialogue is sharp and effective although the play runs too long for narrative comfort and performances are uneven. Nevertheless, led by Eileen Darley, Joey Kennedy and Sally Hillyard, with Frankenstein’s Children the Red Shed has put another season of life in the East End Market.

Interstate theatre at the Festival proved to be mixed. The well-regarded Australian Nouveau Theatre (Anthill) production of The Imaginary Invalid directed by Jean-Pierre Mignon was worse than poorly. Making unimaginative use of the Armoury Lawns, a group of usually able actors- including Malcolm Robertson and Ross Williams -abandoning all hope of making Moliere work for a contemporary audience, proceeded perhaps vainly in the name of commedia dell’ arte, to indulge themselves in terminal mugging and coarse acting. I was relieved to see that some in the audience were enjoying it but I also heard quite a few footsteps ringing behind mine as I took off across the cobbles next to the Migration Museum at interval.

Glen Elston’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Botanic Gardens was quite another matter. An outside chance, I thought in prospect, ill-met at midnight. But snappy performances by a cast of only nine -there was so much doubling Peter Quince had to send in his apologies in Act V Scene i- as well as smart percussion by Michael Barker, shrewd design by Laurel Frank and others, made this production a delight. Cut to the bone and directed at breakneck speed by Elston, it is a comic strip Dream and a clever one at that. It was fresh Australian air after Hamlet is all I can say.

The festival theatre programme while not having works on the scale and originality of Brook’s Mahabharatta or the Theatre Repere’s The Dragon’s Trilogy nevertheless provided splendid and varied theatre. If you saw Archaos and Kathakali, the Dream, Whale Nation, Marat Sade, Bacula’s Pig or any combination of the above you did more than all right. Just as you would have with Ali Akbar Khan, Peter Schreier’s Die Winterreise, the Lyon Ballet, the Frida Kahlo exhibition, Kronos playing Istvan Marta’s Doom, the Kosh, or if you sat with 22,000 of your fellow South Australians at Tosca. In fact it’s enough to make your pancreas tired just thinking about it.

“Festival” The Adelaide Review, No.75, April, 1990, p.30.