Tag: 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival

Festivals, Performances, Review, Theatre

REVIEW: Fr!sk Presents CONTRA

Some are more equal than others

By Myron My

“Welcome, Cousins!”

Contra

This is how we are greeted as we enter the world of Contra for the 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival. But we are not really cousins – we are comrades in a futuristic dystopia where we are blindingly loyal to our great leader and under the ever-watchful eye of – well – just about everyone.

Presented by Fr!sk Festival at the Victorian College of the Arts, there is an immersive element in the first part of this show that felt like I was in a version of 1984 or The Hunger Games. We are all huddled outside and numbers are read out announcing the winners of a lottery to see who will be chosen to work in a career department, a most honoured position.

Surrounding us are posters with propaganda slogans such as “Report or Regret” and “Equal and Fair”. We are then marched single file through the building, getting fingerprint-scanned and collecting our food ration pill. Various precincts are mentioned and ever since ‘The Great Disaster’, we all serve under the watchful eye of The Conductor.

From here on, it’s a fairly straightforward performance exploring the impossibility of curbing natural instincts and speculating as to where the desire for power and ambition can lead. As the audience, we are oppressed civilians watching these character’s lives begin to crumble as the pressure to conform reaches breaking point. The five performers in the cast do a great job in their respective roles but Simone French and Cait Spiker particularly impressed me with the levels of commitment invested into their portrayals. Moreover, the choreography and soundtrack used in the ‘sexual misconduct’ scene was executed effectively in creating an opportunity for these characters – and for their audience – to experience a moment of real emotional connection.

The plot is a familiar one for this dystopian genre with no real twist or surprise, but the initial immersive experience is what won me over. There are ultimately some interesting messages that Contra offers about life, society and expectations, but I feel the play is summed up best with one character’s proclamation that ‘freedom should not be a privilege’.

Contra was presented by Fr!sk Festival at the Victorian College of the Arts as part of the 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Festivals, Review, Theatre

REVIEW: Fr!sk Presents I STILL CALL AUSTRALIA HOMO

Telling, amusing musings

By Myron My

We read about the countries where homosexuality is illegal and even punishable by death. In fact, it’s not so long ago that homosexuality was still illegal in Australia. But what if Australia was in fact, the worst place to be gay? This is what I Still Call Australia Homo speculates over in a clever and humorous way.

I Still Call Australia HomoWritten and performed by Emma Annand, Sonja Bishopp, Adam Ibrahim and Ryan Forbes, the laughs in this performance come through thick and fast whilst the narrative still gets its poignant message across. I enjoyed the fact the writers chose a lighter tone to tell this story rather than going down the dark and serious path. Even though this alternate-Australia is now persecuting homosexuals and experiencing a bombardment of rallies, protests and violence, we don’t see any of that. In fact, apart from some news grabs, we really don’t deal with this powerful backdrop at all.

What we do see are two married couples living the suburban dream, a Stepford Wives-like existence, and this is in part to do with Jack Fordham’s simple yet creative and effective set design and costuming. The couples both have their perfectly kept lawns and rose bushes and their white picket fences while enjoying their BBQs, dinner parties and yoga classes… unfortunately, the two “husbands” are actually falling in love with each other, and it’s here the struggle and turmoil occurs.

With regards the acting, all the cast are admirable, but Bishopp more or less steals all her scenes as the extremely uptight and frustrated Pippa: her nuanced facial expressions, physicality and voice epitomised the overwrought and repressed housewife. Forbes also does well with the male macho bravado of Jake, and with revealing his internal struggle to be true to himself in a world that just won’t allow it.

I would love to see I Still Call Australia Homo get a second life at some point, as more people should have the opportunity to see this play. It is a highly enjoyable piece of theatre, which cleverly mixes humour with an important and meaningful message about equality: does it really matter if the guy next door could in fact be the gay next door?

I Still Call Australia Homo was performed during Fr!sk Festival at the Victorian College of the Arts, as part of the 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Festivals, Review, Theatre, Whats On

REVIEW: Revolt Presents PANIC

Simple, elegant, soulful and sleek

By Myron My

Coming to Australia for the first time and produced and performed by Godot Art Association from Macau and Theatre Moments from Japan for this year’s Fringe Festival, Panic is based on a short story written by Kōbō Abe, a Japanese novelist and dramatist and once a candidate laureate of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Panic

The story revolves around a man who takes an employment exam for a company and ends up waking up next to a dead body. From here, the nightmare has just begun as his life begins to collapse in front of his very own eyes. The running theme in many of Abe’s works of alienation and society’s role in this, are explored and displayed effectively.

The play is performed in three languages: Cantonese, Japanese and English, which is already an interesting aspect to the show, and evokes the idea that we are all the same, and all connected and affected by the world in which we live. It’s enjoyable to attempt to follow the story without understanding what is happening all the time and base your interpretation on the physicality of the actors and your imagination, but to those that do require this ‘security’, there are English subtitles displayed on the wall.

Panic uses a minimalist approach for the whole production, from the staging, to costumes and to props. This forces the companies to get creative with how the themes and narrative are conveyed and portrayed and they do a brilliant job in addressing this issue. Apart from a trolley, toilet paper is the only item used in the performance and takes the place of all the ‘props’ used, from mobile phones to beer and to hairdryers, the insinuation being that, at the end of the day, all these material possessions mean nothing and just get “flushed away”.

Although this doesn’t necessarily affect how I feel about a show, it was a pleasure to see actors on stage genuinely beaming with joy at having performed to an audience. On opening night the applause continued for quite some time after Panic ended, and it was deservedly so.

Venue: Revolt, 12 Elizabeth St, Kensington

Season: Until 28 September| 6:30pm

Tickets: $20 Full | $15 Conc

Bookings: http://www.melbournefringe.com.au

Cabaret, Festivals, Whats On

REVIEW: Hedger and Nicholson’s HOOK UP

Utter delight

By Myron My

15% were single, 15% were seeing someone and 70% were in a relationship – these were the audience statistics taken by Nick Hedger on the evening I attended his 2014 Fringe Festival show, Hook Up. It seemed fitting seeing as the show is a cabaret about relationships and what makes them work (or not work).

Hook Up

Written by Hedger and Ben Nicholson and performed on the piano by the talented Hedger, the diverse range of songs throughout Hook Up showcase the talent of these two men and it’s no surprise they won the Short + Sweet Fringe Development Award last year for this show. With the use of his magic piano and inspired by some real-life stories by friends, Hedger places four people in various relationship scenarios to see how they respond to their circumstances.

The four actors/singers, Michelle Brasier, Josh Ellwood, Vincent Milesi and Laura Johnston each have a brilliant stage presence. Every relationship they portray seems genuine and memorable, and considering they only have a few minutes within each scenario, this is no easy feat. They are able to display the humour and emotion that plays in every real relationship and the connection they have with each other when they’re singing is beautiful both to watch and to listen to as they blend together harmoniously (literally and figuratively).

Josh Ellwood’s fantastic song as a lonely nerd searching for his Pikachu is stuck firmly in my mind, and the homage to 90s video games was a great touch. Similarly, Milesi’s opening number had me in stitches and the duet between Brasier and Johnston and their word games therapy was great to watch.

I walked out of Hook Up grinning from ear to ear and it’s hard to believe this is the Hedger and Nicholson’s first show as a writing team. With its skillful lyrics, amazing voices and a script full of laughs, there is nothing to not like about this show.

Venue: Lithuanian Club, 44 Errol St, North Melbourne

Season: Until 26 September | 10:15pm

Tickets: $25 Full | $20 Conc

Bookings: http://www.melbournefringe.com.au

Cabaret

REVIEW: Nice Productions Presents KING IN EXILE

Vaulting ambitions from young company

By Warwick Moffat

Nice Productions view themselves as a response to a banal entertainment scene. Their plays address the big issues and frequently contain low-level violence, sexual themes or profanity. They strive to offer different perspectives, with theatre that generates genuine feelings within the audience rather than merely entertains. In this sense, they are part of the absurdist theatre tradition. Their latest production King In Exile by Bradley Klendo seeks to provide that alternate view on the big issues of multiculturalism, racism and the tall-poppy syndrome.

King in Exile

In an attempt to express his frustration with a world full of prejudice and mediocrity, a playwright (Raj Joseph) falls into the chaos of his own rough draft as the divide between fiction, reality and dreams become blurred and then altogether disappear. His hero, an Intergalactic King (Thomas Kay) without a realm, is confronted by the Antagonist (Alex Rouse), three Shakespearean witches (Linda Zilinskas, Sarah Nathan-Truesdale, Gabriella Imrich), a sado-masochistic couple (Lisa Dallinger, Nicholas Politis) and a fellow migrant (Sahil Saluja).

Arguments, murderous threats and physical struggle abound; as do occasionally indulgent monologues. Amongst all this, there is a serious message worthy of telling but often lost in the hullabaloo. Many stories about racism place a halo around the victim, but King In Exile suggests some who complain about prejudice and mediocrity can themselves become guilty of a kind of elitism; an arrogant view that no-one can truly understand them. That is a very challenging idea with serious artistic depth.

The performances from the cast varied, but I suspect this was less a reflection on their talent and more on the difficult material. While lacklustre during some of the monologues, the stagecraft was often quite impressive when the play provided dramatic action to work with. Nicholas Politis gave a consistently strong performance in the tough role of an emotionally confused sexual submissive.

Fringe Festival is an opportunity for left-of-centre productions to get an airing, and this play is not out-of-place here. On a number of occasions, the director (Vlady T) achieved his aim of inciting audience response. In parts it was titillating, it sometimes surprised and amused.

The trick with absurdism is to both confront and engage. This is typically done by presenting absurd dialogue and action, but doing so with a storyline structure that is familiar enough to the audience. The true masters of surreal fiction can get away with having an absurd structure, but even they then accept the need to offer the audience familiar dialogue and action. This is an important trade-off. If your dialogue, action and structure is absurd you run the serious risk of losing your audience. With King In Exile, Nice Productions show promise, if they can master the rules before breaking them and embrace the theatre techniques that guide an audience through the absurdity.

Dates: Wed 24th to Sat 27th Sept
Time: 8pm
Location: The Clover Club, Gasworks Arts Park, 21 Graham St, Albert Park
Tickets: $26 Full, $21 Conc.
To book, visit melbournefringe.com.au/fringe-festival/show/king-in-exile or call (03) 9660 9666 OR visit gasworks.org.au or call (03) 9699 3253.

Festivals, Review, Theatre, Whats On

REVIEW: Fringe Festival’s GET LUCKY

Hard to swallow

By Myron My

In Get Lucky presented by the Grey Matter Collective and directed by Brendan Glanville, our protagonist Brien cannot keep an erection. As such, his girlfriend breaks up with him, leading Brien on a journey of self-discovery… except there isn’t much discovering to be done. In fact, I have to say there isn’t much here at all. The story is pretty hard to accept, and there no real depth to be found despite the play’s obvious efforts to look at sexuality and explore the idea of what it is to be a man.

Get Lucky

In terms of acting, Matt Peacock is the strongest by far as the awkward and unsure Brien. The rest of the cast work well with the material given, but I feel they have very little to do other than play out the stereotypes they have been given.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much consistency in either the writing or the development of the characters. At one point, the female character played by Tara Jade is angry with Brien for lying to her about his knowledge of a pretty serious incident at a nightclub, yet a few minutes later she states that she will go out with him because he is the first man to be ‘honest’ with her!

The sexuality aspect in Get Lucky also comes across quite flippantly and without any conviction. Brien has a bit of a wrestle with a fellow gym member and suddenly has an erection and assumes he’s gay. This leads him to having a less-than-memorable experience with a man, and just like that he is straight again. What’s even worse is the way that a female character’s sexual assault at a nightclub is handled. I can see what the writers were trying to accomplish by showing these narratives, but it was misguided and unsuccessful, and made me feel extremely frustrated as an audience member.

Get Lucky really sounded promising on paper, but unfortunately there is more than just performance anxiety preventing this show from taking off.

Venue: Revolt, 12 Elizabeth St, Kensington

Season: Until 4 October | 7:00pm

Tickets: $25 Full | $19 Conc

Bookings: http://www.melbournefringe.com.au

Festivals, Review, Whats On

REVIEW: The Laudanum Project’s THE GRAND GUIGNOL AUTOMATON

Haunting tale of horror…

By Myron My

The Laudanum Project returned to Melbourne Fringe Festival for an exclusive season of The Grand Guignol Automaton. Their fourth production is set in Paris, 1920, and tells the horrific story of Sandrine Moreaux who finds herself at the Theatre du Grand Guignol. It is here she faces her fears, desires and obsessions with beauty.

Our storyteller, Alphonse Cheese-Probert, is masterful in his execution and his ghoulish appearance adds further effect to this visceral story. it’s a highly descriptive narrative that leaves you hanging on to every word as the tale delves into darker and more grotesque territory with every sentence, even without using any props or visual aids.

The Grand Guignol Automaton

Despite his strong presence on stage and the visual delights of the set and costumes, there came a point where I felt something different needed to happen on stage. The story is so intricate and demanding that it was difficult to retain the same level of concentration for over an hour when simply watching a person narrate. The reveal towards the end was very effective in resolving this, but I felt something needed to happen earlier also.

The music is a strong component to this show; the three musicians built the intensity and suspense to high dramatic effect. Costume-wise, the musicians, Lady Sophronia Lick-Penny, Barnabas Oral and Shiny Helen are just as grotesque as the story. Helen on the accordion wears an elephant-man like red silk sack, percussionist Oral has a blindfold covering his gouged-out and bleeding eye sockets and Lick-Penny on the keyboards appears as a ghoul. Always in the background but never overpowering, they blend into the story; and the moments of silence when they are not playing for effect are just as impactful.

The Grand Guignol Automaton may be an unsettling piece of raconteur theatre but it is also a great piece of theatre. It was while I was exiting the venue that I realised I had been holding my breath for quite some time from all the suspense and horror. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what The Laudanum Project come up with next.

The Grand Guignol Automaton was performed at Club Voltaire as part of the 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival.

Circus, Festivals, Review, Whats On

REVIEW: Fringe Festival’s CARNEVIL

Unravel the mystery

By Myron My

I don’t even know where to begin in reviewing CarnEvil, and that is impressive. Conceived by Timothy Christopher Ryan, in collaboration with Stephanie Wood, Alexandra Meerbach, Joseph Chapman, Sam Whelan and Nithya Nagarajan, it is part show, part immersion, part murder-mystery and a whole lot of fun.

Carnevil

Firstly, the transformation of the Collingwood Underground Car Park into a carnival ground is extreme and effective – it even has a maze (and a creepy maze at that). There are tents and stall set up including fortune tellers, medicine women, a peep show and a few carnival games like bobbing for apples. However, even when murder occurs (which it does), the fun and games continue with various performances taking place throughout the course of the night.

We are free to roam and do as we please, and interaction with the actors/performers is heavily encouraged. There are clues and hints to assist in finding the killer and the only way to learn of these is to immerse yourself into the carnival world. I felt like a nosy reporter trying to get as much information as I could.

The variety of dazzling acts range from burlesque, singing and clowning with my highlights on the evening I attended being Whelan’s pole dance routine and guest performer for the night, Sir Hoops A Lot and his mesmerizing hoops work.

The commitment that all the performers have to their characters allows the authenticity of this world to flourish, which is not the easiest thing to do when you don’t really have a script to follow. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Meerbach, Whelan and Woods’ characters and how they interacted with the audience.

CarnEvil is a highly recommended two hours of fun and intrigue – just keep an eye on that pesky clown, you don’t know where he’s going to pop out from…

Venue: Collingwood Underground Car Park, 44 Harmsworth St, Collingwood

Season: Until 27 September | 7:30pm

Tickets: $20 Full | $18 Conc

Bookings: http://www.melbournefringe.com.au

Cabaret

REVIEW: Heath Ivey-Law in AWKWARD CONVERSATIONS WITH ANIMALS I’VE F*CKED

Surprising for all the right reasons

By Myron My

I will admit, the title of Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked was what drew my eye to this show, but this piece is so much more than just a show with a catchy and controversial title.

Written by award winning UK playwright Rob Hayes, we meet Bobby (Heath Ivey-Law) having various one-way conversations with five different sexual conquests, who all happen to be animals. Beginning with man’s best friend (of course), the monologues Ivey-Law delivers look at the fear and desires we have when faced with the notion of being alone or giving yourself over to someone, and also how far we can go or should go in being happy.

Awkward Conversations

James Dalton is skillful as director and despite the confines of the stage and set, manages to keep us entertained by the “action” with some carefully selected props. The way the animals are portrayed on stage is simple but clever and provides Ivey-Law something more to interact with whilst on stage.

Of course, much of the success for a one-man show ultimately rests on the shoulders of the actor. Can they pull this performance off? Can they get the audience to believe the words they are saying? Can they entertain us? Fortunately Ivey-Law is able to do all this and more. His execution of an awkward and unsure yet determined and strong Bobby in this wordy and barrier-pushing script is masterful and manages to create the right blend of comedy and tragedy.

When you take away the animal aspect, Awkward Conversations With Animals I’ve Fucked is ultimately a show about wanting to connect with someone and how far we are willing to go and what we are willing to do to get there. Even though we’re only a few days into the Fringe Festival, I do feel that this is a show that people will continue to talk about after Fringe is over.

Venue: Upstairs at Errol’s, 69-71 Errol St, North Melbourne

Season: Until 26 September | Tues-Fri 10:30pm

Tickets: $25 Full | $19 Conc

Bookings: http://www.melbournefringe.com.au

Festivals, Review, Theatre, Whats On

REVIEW: Fringe Festival’s YOU TOOK THE STARS

Sweet meandering romance

By Myron My

The opening moments of You Took The Stars succeed in setting a romantic and whimsical environment as we are led from the front of the North Melbourne Town to the neighboring alley. Taking a seat at one of the four candlelit tables, we are serenaded by musician Matt Furlani singing Sarah McLachlan’s “Ice Cream”, and then witness the first encounter of Maisie and Paul, and their ensuing relationship.

You Took The Stars

But this is not a traditional love story, or even much of a story for that matter. Writer Cat Commander has chosen to tell this story through the characters rather than through narrative. This sounds very interesting in theory, but in this instance, it was difficult for me to feel an emotional connection to Maisie and Paul, as they perform the various scenes their imaginations create and found myself unable to maintain the level of interest I initially had.

This is through no fault of the acting by Kasia Kaczmarek and John Shearman who do an exceptional job as the two lovers and their performances are what had me most engaged with this show. Alice Darling’s direction further strengthens the chemistry between the two and ensures that issues from performing in such a long, narrow outdoor venue are minimized. It is encouraged, and at times, necessary, as an audience member to move around to get a better view of what is happening as well as hearing the dialogue that is drowned out due to outside noises.

Despite its shortcomings, You Took The Stars is a nice enough show that (literally as well as metaphorically) takes you outside of all the craziness that happens at Fringe and gives you a moment to reflect. And make sure to rug up: this is an outdoor performance.

Venue: Meet on the steps of North Melbourne Town Hall, 521 Queensberry St, North Melbourne

Season: Until 26 September | Tues-Fri 7:00pm

Tickets: $18 Full | $15 Conc

Bookings: http://www.melbournefringe.com.au