2007
March 15

Adelaide
Theatre
Adelaide Fringe 07

Fern Hill and Other Dylan Thomas
Performed by Guy Masterson
Tickets $20 -25.

What I Heard About Iraq
By Simon Levy
Holden Street Theatres’ Directors’ Choice 07

Holden Street Theatres, Hindmarsh
Tickets $17 -23.
Until March 31

Tom Crean –Antarctic Explorer
Written and performed by Aidan Dooley
Bakehouse Theatre until March 23
Tickets$20 – $22.

Rubeville
The Black Lung Theatre
until March 24
Kissy Kissy
The Black Lung Theatre
145 Hindley Street
Until March 16
Tickets: all $ 14
Bookings at Fringetix. Ph.8418 8666

Murray Bramwell

A week into the Fringe festival, all the vital signs are good – long, cheerfully patient queues for stand-up comics, busy city cafes and bars, and at Rundle Park, aka The Garden Of Unearthly Delights is bopping with music, freaks and carny shows. With just over fifty listings, the theatre program is only about half the size of the 2006 Fringe and there have been some late scratchings as well. Many scheduled are school and amateur productions – and one person shows, as though too many years of economic rationalism have reduced the performing arts to individual contractors. But there are also exceptional offerings to be found.

UK director and performer Guy Masterson, returning with Under Milk Wood, has added another Dylan Thomas vehicle, based around Fern Hill, the Welsh poet’s finely wrought hymn to childhood. Masterson chooses well. There is the Auden-like political poem, The Hand that Signed the Paper, and the rages against mortality – the rambunctious Lament and Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.

But it is the prose works, written and performed by Thomas as BBC radio broadcasts, which provide the ballast. Masterson is good on the lilting Welsh, as his wicked impersonations of Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins attest, but he wisely understates the rolling vowels with the gently funny A Visit to Grandpa’s and A Child’s Christmas in Wales, spared the author’s own excesses, is revealed anew as a monologue of distinction.

Few have ever heard of Tom Crean, the Antarctic Explorer, which is why actor and writer Aidan Dooley’s first rate show about the Irish lad who found himself in pioneering expeditions led by both Scott and Shackleton, is such a revelation. Dressed in authentic looking period polar gear, Dooley recounts exploits of danger and endurance that almost defy belief.

But this splendidly crafted script is all nuance and subtext. Rather than a ripping yarn of Empire, it looks beneath the legend. Aidan Dooley, with a disarmingly direct performance which never misses a beat, describes those quiet forms of courage that are most eloquent. You will go to the end of the earth to find theatre this rewarding

The facts also matter in What I Heard About Iraq, written by Simon Levy and based on an article by Eliot Weinberger. The Holden Street Theatre complex has been a hub for the Fringe again this year and owner Martha Lott directs this production featuring five actors, video screens and a ton of information. Taking a leaf from the Living Newspaper of the Thirties, this is the theatre that tells us not only the news fit to print, but takes from journals of record. It is a chronology of events in Iraq from the first Gulf War to the day of performance. Each actor begins “I heard..” and proceeds to quote politicians, commentators and everyday citizens caught in the chaos. There are droll impersonations and grimly funny ironies but the strong effect of all these hearsays is to remind us that the real enemy of spin is sequential thought.

The Black Lung Theatre working in a derelict shopfront next to a strip club in Adelaide’s Hindley Street is a Melbourne collective producing a self-devised season including the nasty-noir Rubeville, Thomas Henning’s deconstructed tale of pros and cons, and Kissy Kissy, directed by Daniel Koerner and featuring Mark Winter and Sarah-Jane St Clair, which describes the go to woe of a love affair with comedy, karaoke, banality and a freshness which is attracting full houses and reminding us that companies like Black Lung breathe new life into the Fringe with theatre this rough and this ready.

“Numbers down but stellar performances” The Australian, March 16, 2007, p.14.