Murray Bramwell

The Bogus Woman
By Kay Adshead
Leicester Haymarket Theatre
February 26. Tickets $8 – $20
Fringe Tix 8418 8666. Until March 10

4.48 Psychosis
By Sarah Kane
Brink Productions
Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide
February 26, Tickets $18 – $24
Fringe Tix 8418 8666. Until March 12

Absence and Presence
Devised by Andrew Dawson
Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide
February 26. Tickets $18.50 – $26.50
Fringe Tix 8418 8666. Until March 4

Pluck
Queen’s Theatre, Adelaide
February 26. Tickets $16 – $20.
Fringe Tix 8418 8666. Until March 19
Riverside Theatre, Parramatta, Sydney
Mar 30 – April 2 . Bookings 02 8839 3399

Borge Again
Devised by Rainer Hersch
Caos Café, Hindley St.
February 25. Tickets $ 19.50 – $24
Fringe Tix 8418 8666. Until March 19

Second only to Edinburgh, the Adelaide Fringe just keeps getting bigger. This year’s model has more than a hundred listings in theatre alone. The first weekend has begun strongly with the Leicester Haymarket production of Sally Adshead’s The Bogus Woman. An asylum seeker at Heathrow airport, known only as the Young Black Woman describes her experiences as a journalist in an unnamed African country. Her daughter and other family members have been butchered before her eyes and she alone is spared. The circumstance is abstract but the details of Adshead’s harrowing monologue – compellingly performed by Sarah Niles – are not. Based, in part, on reports from privatized detention centres in the UK, the woman’s descent into institutional cruelty – and the extent to which she is disbelieved – is an uncomfortable truth for Australian audiences.

Another kind of lethal isolation is that of mental illness. Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, named for the dawning hour when, statistics tell us, more people die than any other time, is a play for voices describing mordantly, bitterly and, often poetically, her anguish. With audience close in on all sides, a capable quartet of actors scratch and prowl in a square of coarse sand. Although Kane’s quarrel with herself and others is sometimes toxically narcissistic, director Geordie Brookman has navigated a problematic text with memorable flair.

Absence and Presence, devised by director, dancer and mime artist Andrew Dawson is autobiographical in quite a different key. Describing his late father, a suburban English postman, Dawson explores the distance in the relationship, as his work as a performer takes him far from the pipe-and-slippers life of his widower parent. But re-reading old, unexpectedly tender and drily ironic letters brings new perspectives. There are echoes of Phillip Larkin in the lyric ordinariness of the father and with a haunting music score, elegant lighting and astute use of video, sculpture and movement, Dawson, thriftily and touchingly, shows how much the child is father of the man.

Classical music and comedy are not often found on the same stage or in the same sentence. Rainer Hersch’s Borge Again, is a delightful excursion into the life of Victor Borge, the Danish comic who became a major success in the US in the late 50s and 60s. With forays at the keyboard and channeling Borge’s deadpan, shaggy dog humour, the very likeable Mr Hersch is well worth a trip to Caos. And then there is Pluck, the zany English string trio who mix slapstick with some very proficient bowing and scraping. Don’t miss their very special transcription of the Overture for 1812.

“Detention and Disbelief” The Australian, March 2, 2006. p.12.