Summer Festival
Adelaide Festival Centre Trust

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The Summer Season, our solace in the off-year between festivals continues to give comfort. In fact, combined with Womadelaide, we can hardly complain about the available fare in these early months when holidays are over, daylight saving fades and the tomato plants have died off. It began with Julian Clary, who has in short time won hearts and minds as the love-child of Kenneth Williams. And continued with John Waters.

Looking Through a Glass Onion is Waters’ account of the life and times of John Lennon with songs from the band and wherds from the Clever One channeled through Waters’ narration. The heavy Liverpudlian accent with its rising inflections is faithfully reproduced but the sheer reverence of it all constrains the show. Opening with Liverpool Lullaby and the sound of the the fatal gunshots the show establishes the tragic frame. There are memories of Hamburg, of being fab and much (from the Peebles interview) about the ballad of John and Yoko. The songs come in mixed order – A Day in the Life, Hide Your Love Away, Glass Onion, Lucy, Norwegian Wood and so on- and the effect is to remind us of the complexity of his subject but Waters doesn’t give reality to it. The quotes he chooses are the chirpy ones and the voice is mostly one of sweet reason.

The thing that distinguished Lennon was that he was difficult and full of contradictions – not as many as Albert Goldman would have us believe, but plenty all the same. Lennon took us along with his changes of mind, persona, locale and significant other. He, like Dylan, was a confessional writer – uniquely so in the primal scream Plastic Ono album. Waters opens that door and then thinks better of it – it is Nowhere Man and Julia that get the emphasis rather than Mother and Remember.
Waters has constructed an interesting show – interesting enough to make you want more. Beatle fans love it -as do, of course, John Waters fans, who seem to be in equal numbers. John Lennon fans may be more cautious. With Stewart D’Arrietta’s bombastic synth work the Working Class Hero starts to sound like Elton John and Waters script is rather quick to present Lennon in his own (self justifying) write. His was a bigger life than that and we can bear to hear the messy bits. We could have had Cold Turkey. Looking through a Glass Onion is a fine idea and John Waters is undoubtedly on to something- but it works best when it gets beyond Sergeant MacKellar’s Lonely Hearts Club Tribute Band and gets close to the Walrus himself.

In the music program in the Summer Season, the Prague Chamber Orchestra showed themselves entirely at ease without a conductor, as they have been since their formation in 1946. The Overture from Figaro was a delight as was the Martinu Serenade. Liana Issakadze’s solo appearance for the Mozart Violin Concerto seemed a shade fractious but it scarcely marred a fine evening. The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir led by Tonu Kaljuste melted audiences with Palestrina and even more so with the Seven Magnificat Antiphons of Arvo Part. Then they changed tack in the second half with Music of the Forgotten Peoples, adaptations of folk works by Veljo Tormis. Kaljuste mugged to the audience, bopped to the music and even persuaded many in the mixed and somewhat startled crowd to do some fingersnapping.

For dance fans the Meryl Tankard ADT opened in the Space with Nuti and Kikimora and the American Indian Dance Theatre toured for the first time. Directed by Hanay Geiogamah, a Kiowa/Delaware from Oklahoma the nineteen member troupe ranging from New Mexico to Alberta perform dances from the all over North America. The variety of styles embrace the traditional Grass Dance, the energetically virtuosic Hoop Dance and the lyric Eagle Dance. The staging, with coloured lighting and copious dry ice, verges on the obvious and, even with frequent returns to the program notes, the presentation is often cryptic and excluding. Especially in the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People it would have been more interesting to have the dancers introduce their work and make contact with an audience eager to connect. Instead the show had a fourth wall artiness about it that in part thwarted its purpose.

The Abbey Theatre is touring here with one of several productions of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, an affectionate memoir of the Mundy family of County Donegal in 1936. Told by Michael, a young boy in a household of sisters, the play explores the unreleased life of the emotions among careworn piece-workers, dulled by piety and inhibition. Lughnasa, the pagan harvest festival challenges the strictures of church and society but as Friel shows, is not enough to vanquish them.

There is a stillness and clarity in the play evident in the straightforward narrative from John Olohan as Michael and ensured by the focussed performances by Marion O’Dwyer as the resourceful Maggie, Des Cave as the troppo priest Jack, and Noelle Brown as patient Agnes. But Friel’s text, particularly with the narrative refracted through Michael’s memories, appropriates the women’s story, makes light of the feckless men and ultimately sugars the play. With Joe Vanek’s semi-abstracted Arcadian set and Trevor Dawson’s honeyed lighting, director Patrick Mason conspires with Friel to soothe us with blarney. This is too often the strategy in Irish writing – the cruelty, inequity and oppression is faced with such fortitude, spirit and fellow feeling that somehow it ceases to be a problem. Certainly, Dancing at Lughnasa runs the risk of being undercut by its own charm.

The Adelaide Review, April 1993, p.38