The Angel and The Red Priest
by Sean Riley
Music direction by Gabriela Smart
Oddbodies Theatre Company
Adelaide Centre for the Arts, Light Square.
March 2.

Lovers and Haters
by Maureen Sherlock and Rob George
Music by Quentin Eyers
Prospect Productions and the Adelaide Festival
Norwood Town Hall, March 6.
Tickets $40- $50. Bookings BASS 131 246
Until March 16.

Two new works in the Adelaide Festival dealing with historical figures have produced wildly different results. The priest in The Angel and the Red Priest is a young Antonio Vivaldi, in a Venetian orphanage where the young women are trained as singers to perform for the well-to-do. Writer Sean Riley has developed his text from a radio play and it features five musicians performing excerpts of Vivaldi’s work. The central focus is on the shy, institutionalised Agata (Johanna Allen) who, smitten with the composer (Stephen Sheehan) and yearning for the wider world, looks to the music to set her free. Although appealingly designed by Dean Hills and given a Titian glow by Susan Grey-Gardner, the production is theatrically undeveloped as if it never reconciles the mix of music and narrative. And there is only an unsurprising inevitablity when Agata is abandoned by the man for all four seasons.

There is little known about Vivaldi’s life but a great deal is known about Don Dunstan even though, extraordinarily, he still awaits a proper biographer. Maybe that’s the problem when Lovers and Haters takes on an ambitious slice of the former South Australian premier’s controversial career. There is passing reference, all from Don himself, about his accomplishments, but much more to say about his foibles and indiscretions. Unlike Keating the Musical! which simplifies to succeed and wears its enthusiasm on its Armani sleeve, Lovers and Haters makes a number of disconcerting and unresolved shifts in tone and point of view. Writers Rob George and Maureen Sherwood might well say, that using the elements of an undergraduate revue, they are not taking their task too seriously but the effects of their flippancy can be serious anyway.

There is great material to be found in the public life of Dunstan- the pink hot pants in Parliament, his trip to the sea shore to send back the predicted tidal wave, his forthright decision to sack his police commissioner and his unapologetic championing of the arts – both theatrical and culinary.Then there is the compromising saga of his relationship with John Ceruto. This, and his marriage to Adele Koh are explored in a mix of clunky dialogue and precariously performed song – and the effect, deliberate or not, is lampoon. In the lead, Todd McDonald looks the part, but fails to capture what impressed about Dunstan despite his flaws. If this was all there is, much less would be at stake. So this production will have its own lovers and haters. It is a sad irony, perhaps, that the only politician to deserve having a theatre named after him, should be depicted – in the Adelaide Festival itself – in such a ramshackle, if ultimately well-meaning, production.

Murray Bramwell

“Narrative fail to nail their man” The Australian, March 10, 2008, p.16.