This year’s Come Out Festival in Adelaide has devoted special attention to visual arts and literature. Under the umbrella Dreams of Youth – Apocalypse or Utopia, 60 young artists interpret their world. They range from Rhianon Vernon-Roberts’ Arms Talk, which portrays the lack of communication between East and West to Andrew Dearman’s message-free wire sculpture Boy On A Swing.

The writing section is opened up for scrutiny in Allwrite, a celebration of young people as writers and readers.

Music and dance also have a strong presence. Metropolis – Dances for New Pedestrians, choreographed by David Atkins and performed by the Australian Dance Theatre and the Adelaide Dance Company, is a melange of Mad Max and Countdown clips via West Side Story updated to the punk era.

There were no punks in the Australian Youth Orchestra, giving its first concert since its triumphant 1984 European gigs, nor in the Penang Youth Orchestra. But increasingly conventional punk stereotypes appeared in both Stravinsky’s Soldiers Tale, mounted by the Adelaide College of Music, and The State Opera Youth Company’s premiere production of Grahame Dudley’s The Snow Queen. The young singers and orchestra were never less than adequate, the set design (Michael Pearce) and direction (Chris Johnson) much more than that.

The story, based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale, was simple and clear, the music striking. All in all a fine piece of music theatre.

Richard Tulloch’s Dad is Yuk! at the Patch Theatre Centre is a worthy successor to Year Nine Are Animals. Tulloch’s works touch on familiar problems for school-aged children.

This play interweaves quite different kinds of theatre into a fluent whole. There are a series of skits of Dad and his two children Julian, 12, and Emma, 6, as they encounter the ordeals of breakfast, shopping, homework and culinary innovations. The writing is sharp but not smart and tangles with vexed domestic issues, such as missing money from the bedroom dresser and sibling jealousy.

As Dad, David Reed provides a nicely poised foil for the capable Marcella O’Hare as Emma and Patrick Frost, as Julian.

The mime sequences which alternate with the family scenes take our attention back to many of the same issues and reinforce our recognition of them with quite painless didacticism. The movement by Mladen Mladenov, Katheryn Niesche and Minh Ha is crisp and economical and the Punch and Judy prologue and coda with assorted on-stage sound effects from the other actors added yet another theatrical style into a delightful production.

Sydney’s Toe Truck Company’s production of Dancing in The Street skilfully uses the rap and break dancing craze as the focus for a study of four Sydney teenagers. The play is bursting with worthy concern about cultural alienation, age, gender politics and peer loyalty and yet again David Holman shows his remarkable talent for putting abstract nouns into believable human situations and making first rate theatre.

Tony is Lebanese, Ali and Nezzi are Turkish. All are caught between the claims of family and tradition.

A pair of rap dancers become interested in Vince and Violet, a famous dancing duo from the late 1930’s, and with the aid of a radio DJ track them down to discover that the old hoofers have more to teach than tap.

The simple satisfactions of the narrative are delicately balanced with Holman’s refusal to wish away the real difficulties for the characters – Nezzi is still in conflict as a young Turkish woman in Australia, Tony still flies to Beirut to the war. In the play young people have real emotions, not just “teenage” reflexes.

David Young’s direction is tight and effective. Three screens provide a procession of back-projected images which relate to the storyline and provide a collage of music and dance images which flows easily with the production. Eamon D’Arcy’s and Denis del Savero’s visuals never distract from or compete with the performances.

The players contend with the delicacy of the writing with deceptive ease. Mick Conway draws on his matchbox of tricks to provide continuity as the DJ, low comedy as Baby George and good bloke sentimentality as Vince the former King of Tap. Steve Coupe as Tony, Julie Haseler as Nezzi and Greg Stone as Ali all perform well to make the play work. Gillian Hyde deserves particular mention – her range and focus with three demanding roles is admirable.

In New Canadian Kid, director and playwright Dennis Foon has contrived a setting for English speaking audiences to glimpse the frustrations and distress of having to relinquish culture and language in a new country.

Nick is a young immigrant from a place called Homeland who has come to Canada with his parents. At school he meets Mencha and Mog who do not speak Homelander and he struggles to express himself only to be misunderstood and disparaged.

He attempts to learn Canadian speech which is rendered as a form of phonetic nonsense amusingly similar to English with echoes of the confected dialect of A Clockwork Orange.

Brian Linds as Nick presents an engaging blend of vulnerability and persistence and Brian Torpe as the bully, Mog, comically pouts, sulks and taunts the new arrival. He and Wendy Noel (Mencha) maintain a rapid and engrossing dialogue giving familiar inflexions to their gibberish creating an effective dissonance.

Honeyspot, Jack Davis’ first play for young audiences is an even more timely play for Australian audiences. It confronts racist and ethnocentric attitudes but it beguiles rather than preaches using music, mime and dance to display the values it propounds.

The story revolves around the friendship between two children -the white daughter of a forest warden and a young Aboriginal boy living with his aunt and cousin. The play focuses on the undeclared racism of the girl’s father and the process of mutual regard that the characters experience as they shed stereotypical attitudes.

The play is frankly manipulative in its sentimentality and cheerful resolution but there is nothing fatuous or simplistic in its purpose. It provides an occasion for celebrating Nyoongah (aboriginal) culture with bird and animal dancing and didgeridoo music.

Michael Watson and Shane Abdullah are skilful actors as well as traditional performers. With Melissa Bickerton they convincingly portray the efforts of the three young people to find accord and the script has enough sense of idiom and humour to spare us any insincere claptrap.

The Honeyspot is the place where the children meet to rehearse a performance which is a blend of traditional and European dance and the scenes where each tries to teach the other ballet steps and corroboree movements provides hilarious and instructive satire.

Murray Bramwell and Christopher Pearson (paras 1-5)

The National Times, May 31, 1985, p.33.