Theatre: A Circle of Buzzards (★★★)

Written by Nathaniel Moncrieff
Directed by Joe Lui
Performed by Austin Castiglione, Jeremy Mitchell and Ella Hetherington
PICA
Until 21 Feb

In Steve Earle’s song, A Gringo’s Tale, two American men strike up a conversation at a bar in an out-of-the-way Mexican town. One is a tourist; the other is a fugitive, hiding from some shadowy CIA operatives.
Substitute Australians for Americans, Spain for Mexico and an Australian mining company called The Saetón Group for the CIA and you’ve got the set-up for Nathaniel Moncrieff’s tidy little thriller, A Circle of Buzzards.
What Earle neglected, and Moncrieff has made the engine of his narrative, is the identity of the tourist, and his reasons for being in the bar plying his companion with drinks.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Moving On Inc. (★ ★ ★ ★)

Written and directed by Mikala Westall
Lighting and sound designer Joe Lui
Performed by Nicola Bartlett, Harriet Gordon-Anderson and Barnaby Pollock
Until February 21

The actor Mikala Westall impressed in her recent performances in Will O’Mahoney’s Great White and Joe Lui’s The Tribe. Now she has a play of her own, Moving On Inc., and has come up trumps first time.
Westall’s jumping off point is the little known profession of cleaning up the effects of the deceased. What interested her in particular is the idea of tidying up all those memories, allowing everything that people were to move on into their eternity.
Abby (Harriet Gordon-Anderson) and her boyfriend Sam (Barnaby Pollock) are taking her late dad’s effects into the bush to burn them. There’s something – or someone – on the road, and Sam can’t get the car started again after he swerves to avoid a collision.
An older woman, Ruth (Nicola Bartlett) appears, and seems to be more interested in what the couple are planning, and know more about the effects they plan to do it to, than makes for a relaxing evening.

Theatre: The Defence

Baste the Bagel
Written and directed by Chris Dunstan
AV designer Alex Perritt
Sound designer Kirby Medway
Performed by Catherine McNamara, Brett Johnson and Douglas Niebling
Until February 21

(★ ★ ★ ★)

The bizarre, sometimes shocking, aspects of Chris Dunstan’s The Defence, shouldn’t obscure that it is an extremely well made, disciplined play with an impressive degree of cultural literacy and some important points about gender, power, and the theatre, to make.
In it, the boy’s club mentality of the rehearsal room is paralleled with wider issues of gender indignities and the pervasive undertow of sexual violence. Dunstan manages to make his play both pornographic and hilarious (though, I must warn you, not everyone in the audience saw the humour, and I can’t criticise them for that).
I got an urgent text from someone telling me not to miss this “surprise Fringe hit” after its opening night. It was good advice – you should take it too.



Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Undermined

By Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi and Luke Brown
KBT Productions/ Here Manje
Adapted and directed by Tara Notcutt
Songs and choreography by Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi
Performed by Stefan Erasmus, Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi and Luke Brown
Teatro 2 until February 19

(★★★★)

Young Madlebe has reached manhood in his village of Hluvuko in Mozambique. It’s a bone dry, harsh place, and his warrior father, Nkosi, only manages to sustain the family because of his hunting skills.
Madlebe is determined to earn money to help support his family and to marry his sweetheart, Yemala. For Madlebe, and many thousands of other Mozambicans, this means South Africa, and for many of them, that means the mines.
The production, directed by Tara Notcutt – who has become as driving a force at the Perth Fringe (she has brought four quality shows to this year’s festival) as she is in independent theatre in South Africa – accentuates the strength and energy of its hero. Its episodic, comic strip form briskly propels the narrative and provides plenty of action and humour along the way.

Stefan Erasmus, Luke Brown and Nhlanhla Mkhwanazi

The three performers, who each play Madlebe at different times in his story, combine wonderfully in the stirring songs and dances created by Mkhwanazi through which, along with some inventive physical theatre, most of the story is told.
They represent the different ethnicities of the new South Africa, with all its dark legacy and vast human potential. Its theatre, in the hands of Notcutt and others of like mind and talent, is a window into that world, so like ours yet so distinct, in its past and uncertain future, from us.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Undermined runs until Feb 19, and Notcutt’s other remaining Fringe production, Last Rounds, until Feb 21. Fellow South Africans Jemma Kahn and Glen Biderman Pam’s The Epicene Butcher and Amateur Hour both run until Feb 22. I strongly recommend them all.               

Cabaret: Gillian Cosgriff is Whelmed

Written and performed by Gillian Cosgriff
PICA
Until 21 Feb

(★★★½)

What’s not to like about Gillian Cosgriff? She’s smart – seriously smart – spunky (both meanings), funny, sweet, sings well, plays at least okay, and has arms that go all the way up to her shoulders. All of it at 27, a baby in this game.
The performers she gets compared to, Tim Minchin, Kate Miller-Heidke, Claire Bowditch, read like a who’s who of something or other, but you get the picture. An hour with Ms Cosgriff is not one you’re likely to want back.
For all that, Whelmed is an odd little show. It’s a grab bag of stories and songs with a loose unifying theme something along the lines of “Gillian Cosgriff is a smarty-pants”.
Perhaps Whelmed is a breather between more substantial, revealing work, or an example of the time it takes an artist to fashion talent into vision.
Either way, it's a show you genuinely can enjoy while you wait for Gillian Cosgriff’s real thing to come along.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Thread

Written and directed by Elena Zucker
Little y Theatre Company
Performed by Mischa Ipp
The Velvet Lounge
Until Feb 18

(★ ★ ★)

Mischa Ipp returns to Perth with Thread, a taut, intense cyber-thriller written for her by New York playwright Elena Zucker, in whose work Ipp has appeared several times. There’s no doubt that the playwright and actor have a deep understanding of the other’s talents and motivations.
Zucker’s writing is dense, sometimes almost hallucinatory, and Ipp is a fine vehicle for it. There’s too much to take in, let alone think about, to make Thread entirely successful, though. While some of the points Zucker makes, either directly or indirectly, are deeply insightful, they still need to be ordered and given more space for an audience to take in and respond to.
When she does, she’ll have a very interesting, thought-provoking play. She already has the actor it needs.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: Waves

Alice Mary Cooper
The Stables
Until February 12

 (★★★★)

The extraordinary story of Elizabeth Moncello, the Australian girl who invented the butterfly stroke and took it to triumph at the 1938 Berlin Olympics, had completely eluded me until I heard it told by Alice Mary Cooper in her beautiful monologue, Waves.
Cooper met Elizabeth last year, in the final months of her long life, in a nursing home in Edinburgh, where they both lived. The 95-year-old lady was still sharp, still swimming, and little by little Alice learned about her, and her incredible life.
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Oh, like most great stories, in fact as much as fiction, there’s a twist. This one, uniquely, comes after the show is over, and makes what has gone before even more impressive.
Ask Cooper what it is on your way out.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Circus: ZWÄI

Performed by Jonas and Esther Slanzi
Big Top
11 – 19 Feb

(★★★★)

ZWÄI, the circus of Jonas and Esther Slanzi, is dedicated to their artform’s aesthetic, rather than its spectacle. 
ZWÄI means “two” in their native Swiss-German. In a series of simple, graceful routines, using the bare minimum of equipment, a rope between two suspended pulleys, a small table and ten green bottles (sitting on the floor), the Slanzis play out an even-tempered story of teasing and enchantment – anything you can do, I can do better – between a couple.
Esther is an angel on a rope, slim, delicate and composed; Jonas, too, is no ordinary acrobat/strongman, with his pale skin and high forehead, he looks like a Werner Herzog character.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Music: Big Kids Night Out

Peter Combe
Circus Theatre
Friday 13 Feb

In her review of Peter Combe’s daytime show for ungrown-ups, our Kate Prendergast perfectly caught the irresistibly silly magic than brews when Combe and kids get together. In an inspired bit of programming, the Fringe had him back later – much later –when the tackers would definitely, absolutely be asleep (and not able to laugh at us), for another spin through his fantastic repertoire, this time for adults.
I realised, as I listened to Combe doing his only cover, George Harrison’s sweet, limpid Here Comes The Sun, that, like The Beatles, it’s a much stronger and deeper connection than mere nostalgia that brought these grown-ups back to hear these songs again. 
For them, Peter Combe and his music have never made way for other toys.




Link here to the complete review in The West Australian, and here for Kate Prendergast's review of Combe's kids' show.

Theatre: CONCRETE: heartbeat and Yours the Face

Two solo shows visiting Perth for Fringe World come with strong pedigrees and big wraps, but neither set the house on fire.

 








CONCRETE: heartbeat (★★★)
kdmindustries
Created and performed by Mark Haslam
PICA Studio
Until 14 Feb
One of the great joys of my distant childhood was a View-Master stereoscope and the crude but magical 3D images on its reels.
Mark Haslam’s CONCRETE: heartbeat shares that enchantment, but when the visuals were absent, or static, Haslam’s words and performance lacked the intensity to make the piece truly compelling.

Yours the Face (★★½)
By Fleur Kilpatrick
Quiet Little Fox
Directed by Sarah Walker and Robert Reid
Performed by Roderick Cairns
The Blue Room
Until 7 Feb 
Yours the Face is the story of an affair between an Australian photographer and an American model in London, both played by WAAPA graduate Roderick Cairns.
It’s a disappointment, despite Cairns’s impressive talent and skilful direction by Sarah Walker, who also designed the photo-shoot set, and Robert Reid. The story meanders through hackneyed high-life scenarios to tedious sexual adventures and a fiery twist too soggy to ignite.

Link here to the complete review of both shows in The West Australian    

Theatre: Yoshi's Castle and Monroe and Associates

The indie stars at The Last Great Hunt have made a serious splash at this year’s Fringe, reviving two hits, Elephents and Bruce, and unveiling Fag/Stag, Yoshi’s Castle, and Monroe and Associates. They are all very tidy additions to the Perth based, internationally touring, company’s repertoire.

 





Yoshi’s Castle (★★★½)
Written and devised by Gita Bezard
Devised and performed by Arielle Grey and Adriane Daff
The Stables
Until 9 Feb

Yoshi’s Castle is a sweet confection with just enough tart in its centre. Tilly (Arielle Grey) and Yoshi (Adriane Daff) are half-sisters gathered at their deceased dad’s house to reveal the contents of his will.
Despite the fun and games of their reunion, there’s wariness between them, because Tilly can’t, or won’t, tell her sister the whole story of why she’s here.
Yoshi’s Castle is a Fringe hour very well spent.

Monroe and Associates
Created by Tim Watts
The Blue Room
Until 21 Feb (sold out)

Tim Watts, working with his dead clever dad Anthony, has created a devilish little crime noir world in a caravan parked outside the Blue Room.
You’ve woken up in Sunset City hospital, but you don’t know who you are. Over the next 45 minutes you’ve got to unscramble your past – and try to stay alive doing it. It’s the movie you always wanted to be in, superbly engineered by Watts.
The rest is what you make of it, including the star rating. I’m giving myself ★★★★. 

Link here to the complete reviews in The West Australian

Theatre: Tatterdemalion

Flabbergast Theatre
Written and performed by Henry Maynard
Deluxe Theatre
(★ ★ ★ ★)

Henry Maynard’s adventurous career includes a stint as the head of Tophorn in War Horse on the West End and heading up UK’s award-winning Flabbergast Theatre (who also brought Boris and Sergey's Vaudevillian Adventure to this year’s Fringe).
All of which is good training for his marvellous little Tatterdemalion, and especially for performing it to a young couple, two twenty-something girls, a guy with an artist’s pass and a passing reviewer, in the tiny Deluxe Theatre in the Fringe’s Pleasure Garden on a hot summer afternoon.


Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

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

Theatre: The Bookbinder

Written and designed by Ralph McCubbin Howell and Hannah Smith
Trick of The Light
Directed by Hannah Smith
Music by Tane Upjohn Beatson
Performed by Ralph McCubbin Howell
Blue Room Theatre until 31 January

(★★★★½)

Inside a magic book, a boy goes on a journey to right a wrong, save himself and, perhaps, a world.
It’s a tale told, in all its variety, from the earliest fairy tales to today’s multiplex family magnets, but rarely with the charm, wit and inventiveness of this tiny gem from New Zealand’s Trick of the Light.
For anyone who is in breathless anticipation of seeing the much-heralded Paper Architect at PIAF, and everyone who hasn’t been able to get a ticket to its sold out season, The Bookbinder is a must. You’d better hurry.

Link here to the compete review in The West Australian