Theatre: Fag/ Stag

The Last Great Hunt
Written and performed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler and Chris Isaacs
PICA
Until 7 Feb
 
(★★★★)

Corgan and Jimmy are BFF. Or, more accurately, Corgan is Jimmy’s SBF and Jimmy is Corgan’s GBF.
Corgan and Jimmy are 28 and at a crossroads in their life, even though they don’t quite realise it and haven’t the faintest idea how to handle it.
At a loose end, Jimmy moves in with Corgan, and their two worlds collide with unintended consequences.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Sex Idiot and Fake it ’til you Make it

Life is art for Bryony Kimmings, warts and all.
Whether it’s the search for the source of her STD in Sex Idiot, or her relationship with her clinically depressed fiancée in Fake it ’til you Make it, the art she makes from her life is courageous, outrageous, dangerous and, above all, free.
That freedom is the core quality of her art.






Sex Idiot (★★★★½)
Written and performed by Bryony Kimmings
Circus Theatre
Friday 6 Feb
 In Sex Idiot, Bryony discovers she has contracted an STD and resolves to find its source, starting, logically enough, at the beginning.
It's a dazzling cabaret of songs, dance, stunts and gags, one act for each of her lovers. Kimmings excoriates and self-excoriates, weeps and laughs – at us, herself, and the whole damn thing.
Kimmings is utterly fearless and completely herself. I can’t recall when I’ve seen an artist so comfortable in her own skin. 

Fake it ’til you Make it (★★★½)
Written and performed by Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn
PICA
Until 7 Feb 
The same courage makes Fake it ’til you Make it tenderly affecting. Kimmings’ fiancée Tim Grayburn is on stage with her; his illness can cripple and endanger him, and it’s clear that Kimmings uses her creative skills to support and protect him. 
The love between the two of them is palpable, but so is Kimmings’ terror when Grayburn doesn’t reply to her texts, or she sees an open window and suddenly thinks the unthinkable but entirely possible. 
It’s been a revelation to see this remarkable artist at work in both her Fringe shows.

Theatre: Venus in Fur

By David Ives
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Director and costume designer Lawrie Cullen-Tait
Set designer Patrick Howe
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Sound designer and composer Brett Smith
With Adam Booth and Felicity McKay
STC Studio
Until February 8

(★★★★½)

Felicity McKay (pic: Gary Marsh)

It’s the end of a long, dismal day for the director Thomas Novachek. He’s auditioning actresses for his adaptation of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novella Venus in Furs, and no-one’s come close to nailing the part.

He’s packing up to leave when a girl called Vanda Jordan bursts in, overcoat and duffle bag, blonde hair dishevelled: “Am I too late? I’m too late, right? Fuck. Fuck!” (that last expletive somehow extended to three syllables).

It’s a fabulous entrance and a taste of what’s to come in David Ives’ delicious layer cake of a play-within-a-play-within-a-book, Venus in Fur.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: 2 Ruby Knockers, 1 Jaded Dick

Written and performed by Tim Motley
Teatro 1
Until March 4

(★★★)

I’d completely forgotten that Tim Motley, the American/ Australian comedian, was also a magician, and that his faux noir character, Dirk Darrow, solves his comic cases by mindreading as well as more traditional gumshoe techniques.
It wasn’t because of the battering my increasingly marginal memory gets in the frenzy of Fringe, or that I last saw him, in Dirk Darrow NCSSI, was at the end of a particularly dud-filled evening a few years ago.
It’s because Dirk Darrow is such a great character, and Motley so good at playing him, that the magic tricks were superfluous and unmemorable. It’s a bit of a shame that the denouement is a bill-in-a-sealed-envelope trick – impressive though it is – rather than a bad guy with some extra holes in him and a grateful broad giving him an invitation he can’t refuse. 


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Promise and Promiscuity

Written and performed by Penny Ashton
With material from Jane Austen
Teatro 2, Pleasure Gardens
Until Feb 3

(★ ★ ★  ½)

One can only imagine what Jane Austen would have made of the Fringe, but I suspect she would have been pleased by Penny Ashton’s one-woman homage to her, even if a little taken aback at times.
She would have remembered some of the lines, though, because she wrote 33 of them, strategically sprinkled throughout seventy minutes of drawing rooms, carriages and, especially, balls.
Austen also would have also recognized the story. Lovely (but dangerously nerdish) Elspeth Slowtree battles against the marriage plans of their Mama for her and little sister Cordelia. Meanwhile, she is secretly earning a small income writing pirate stories for the local paper, The West Quiglian, the family having been left in genteel poverty by their late father.
Suitors come and go, but then — here comes love, in the form of the dashing Reginald Wrexham. Their minds meet, their hearts do too. Before you know it, Reggie is off to seek the blessing of Lady Wrexham for their nuptials. Uh oh…

Theatre: Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind

The Neo-Futurists
Created by Greg Allen
Written, directed and performed by Paige Saliba, Willie Caldwell, Olivia Kingsley, Ryan Good and Mike Puckett
Teatro 2 until February 4

(★★★★)


Just quickly, here’s how Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind works (the title, by the way, is of no particular significance). The cast undertake to perform 30 plays in 60 minutes, in an order selected by the audience from a “menu” in the programme. Each play ends when a cast member shouts “Curtain!”; the next begins when one of them shouts “Go!”. Each week between two and twelve of the plays are replaced with new pieces devised by the cast during the week.
So it’s not improvisation in the particular sense, but it feels like the best of that unpredictable genre. There are plenty of laughs, some pointed statements, an underlying sense of surrealism, and a beautiful synchronicity amongst the cast and between them and the audience.
Not to be missed.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Music: From a Small, Distant World

Written and performed by Rachael Dease
With Brian Kruger, Hayley-Jane Ayres, Aaron Wyatt, Tristan Parr and Jozef Grech
Art Gallery of Western Australia until 31 January

(★★★½)

There is something ethereal about Rachael Dease, the West Australian composer/performance artist who won the inaugural Martin Sims award for City of Shadows at the 2012 Fringe.
Her mesmeric aura and powerful mezzo-soprano voice give her a potent stage presence, and a high musical intelligence and cultural literacy inform all her work.
Dease takes her otherworldliness to a cosmic level with From a Small, Distant World, a suite of eleven songs inspired by the Voyager project that sent two satellites to Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus in 1977.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian