2004
Murray Bramwell
The Fringe theatre program is strong this year and deserves support. Now is the time to have a binge – we won’t have anything like as many chances once the Fringe and Festival tide recedes and we are back in dark old Adelaide again. We can regret that the program is a crowded one and that no-one realistically can see more than a fraction of the ninety-something theatre productions listed, but with a range of international shows on offer, as well as promising new national and local work, we have to gather those rosebuds while we may.
APA has brought in a couple of excellent pieces from Clancy Productions in New York. CJ Hopkins’ Horse Country features Bob (Kurt Rhoads) and Sam (Ben Schneider), two jokers in a bar slugging back the bourbon and putting the world to rights. Freewheeling through a conversation with more revs than David Mamet they are killing time by waiting – for some poker playing Godot perhaps ? The subjects on the agenda veer through the American Century, suggesting disconnection, historical guilt and calling up nostalgia for yet more frontier now that the West has turned into LA. The actors are sharp, very skilled and fun to watch, the play is as plain as a broken chair and sometimes as enigmatic as whatever happened to that nine of diamonds.
Susan is a lecturer in meltdown. In front of her Literature and Philosophy class her subject today is death and suffering. And, it turns out, it is all about her. It has something to do with Cincinnati, a city to which she almost returns but then cannot. Her hopes, we discover, are in flames and her mind is at the edge. Nancy Walsh carries Don Nigro’s perceptively detailed text with a winning mix of comic defiance and unquenchable despair.
Is there no relief from the prison of the self ? Apparently not. Theatre Simple’s adaptation of Notes from Underground dramatises Dostoevsky’s tract revealing, as he put it, “the real man of the Russian majority.” Ninety years before Sartre and one hundred and sixty before Seinfeld, he delves the overheated consciousness of the Underground Man. Co-founder of Seattle company, Theatre Simple, Andrew Litzky, sparks and fizzles with quixotic resistance to the rules of arithmetic and the solidity of walls. Charging out into the streets of St Petersburg he recoils at the absurdity and cruelty of social encounter. It is a fine perfomance bringing what had become an esoteric text again into a familiar idiom.
A new playwright proficient in idiom is Caleb Lewis. His cluster of short plays Songs For the Deaf, from Fresh Track Productions, suggests an emerging writer of some originality. His work is a paradox because while his comedy is ferociously black it is never heartless or oversimplified and he has an ear for the manners and anxieties of contemporary Australia. In Bunny, a young woman (Romy Loor) dressed in a rabbit outfit is serenaded by a young man (Andrew Brackman) dressed as a bear. The hostility and prickliness of first encounter gives way, first to reluctant civility and then to unexpected self disclosure.
The Half Windsor is an intriguing study in the reversals of power. A homeless man (Caleb Lewis) is sleeping on cardboard on the footpath. Suddenly a well-dressed man (Roman Vaculik ) not only wants to talk to him, he is ready to pay for his time, he even gives him his silk tie which he prepares in a half windsor at the tramp’s regal insistence. Proof that people only really pay attention when they want something, the man wants the tramp to move because he’s devaluing his newly acquired real estate. The piece ends dangerously and somewhat abruptly – it is a situation that could usefully stand some further development from the writer. .
Rocket Baby, is an award winning monologue which features Becca, a little tyke in Grade Four at Gepps Cross Primary School. She is preparing a video message for Toni Pearen. She tells her about the things that have been happening in her family, that her mum has left and her dad is desperate and wants her back. He gets the idea that if he makes a video of the kids for Australia’s Funniest Home Videos their mum will see them and want to return. Roberta Tyrell skilfully unfolds the story with wide-eyed enthusiasm even as the narrative turns alarmingly bleak. Lewis’ text is clever and has much to say about television as a kind of cathedral of collective fantasies and delusions, it also captures the pain for a little girl as life falls apart all around her.
Another production from Fresh Track is Morph by Brendon Cowell. Directed by Geordie Brookman who brought us the highly accomplished production of The Return in 2002, Morph is about transformation and the body as carapace. Grace (Melanie Vallejo) is a dancer obsessed with her exercises and her starvation diet, Be (Brendan Rock) is a ruffie with broken legs. He has a habit of jumping out of windows but can’t seem to kill himself. With Grace he finds ambition and becomes a fitness junkie while she abandons her regimen in surrender to his influence. Both look for identity in the physical self and both disintegrate at the touch of the other.
Cowell’s notion is an interesting one, even if the play does not always explore it clearly. The text has repetitions and puts pressures on actor and director to keep our attention. The music by Mark Harding and Liam Gerner certainly helps keep things on track.
From the torments of the particular to those of the generic, Crazed presented by Frumpus and Vitalstatistix takes a witty look at the slasher/horror style of B grade film of the past twenty years. The gaze shifts from slasher to slashee and the ensemble of five, led by Cheryle Moore, assembles a montage of sketches and scream-synched film footage of blondes in danger in remote locations, creepy telephone calls, sado-nurse comedy, dance routines in red sleeping bags and fangy looking hand puppets. It is an wonderfully indescribable rampage on the senses complete with the shrieking metal music familiar to the genre. The point of Crazed is very describable, however. While it is empoweringly funny, it also makes us think very hard about the misogynist and destructive reality of what we call our entertainment.
The weeks ahead at the Fringe are packed with enticements. Some of my comedy choices include Daniel Kitson, Rod Quantock, the Brit Com and Best of Fest, Lano and Woodley, I’ve Got a Bug, Trenwith and Fitch and the Baudrillard Brothers. And for that theatre et al we hardly ever get to see – I would like, among many, to catch – Brown, Chornobyl Story, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Dark Paths, Pandora 88, The Caretaker, Can’t Stand Up for Falling Down, Suburban Motel, Let’s Go Hop, William Zappa, more Theatre Simple and X-Ray – Chris Tugwell’s account of David Hicks’ unlawful incarceration in Guantanamo Bay. There are fund-raiser performances, watch out for them.
“Strength in Depth” The Adelaide Review, No.246, March, 2004. p.21.