Theatre: Jesus No Ordinary Life (★★½)

Written and directed by Damon Lockwood
Featuring Andrea Gibbs, Brendan Hanson, Nick Pages-Oliver, Sean Walsh, Shane Adamczak and Talei Howell-Price
Designed by Cherie Hewson
Blue Room Theatre
Until July 4

The release of Monty Python’s Life of Brian in 1979 drew howls of outrage and demonstrations outside cinemas from religious groups accusing it of blasphemy and worse.
I doubt that we’ll be seeing earnest people with crucifixes and placards picketing the Blue Room season of Damon Lockwood’s Jesus: No Ordinary Life (even though it’s much more scurrilous than Brian ever was).
Which is a pity, because it would be a diverting way to start a night at the theatre – and it means I’ll have to do the complaining for them.
It’s not that this Jesus offends my wafer-thin religious sensitivities; I just struggle to see what it achieves. 
Towards the end, Lockwood has a character say: “Reviewers, make of this what you will.” That, I’m afraid, is leading with your chin.

Go to the complete review in The West Australian 

Theatre: This is Not a Love Song

By Greg Fleet
Directed by Tegan Mulvany
Designed by Christian Barratt
Performed by Greg Fleet, Tegan Mulvany, Shane Adamczak and Michael de Grussa

A remarkable thing about the stand up comedian Greg Fleet is how unfunny he is. He doesn’t pull funny faces or do funny voices, and he doesn’t crack jokes. What he does, though, is tell stories about life and its vicissitudes, mixing an audacious combination of logic and absurdity from which the human comedy grows like bread rising in an oven.
Fleet brings this considerable skill to his debut play, This is Not a Love Song, and it’s a cracker. It’s also going to be a runaway hit.

Link here to the complete review on The West Australian website

Theatre: Trampoline

By Shane Adamczak
Directed by Damon Lockwood
Performed by Shane Adamczak, Amanda Woodhams and Ben Russell
The Blue Room Theatre
Until October 26

Matt (Shane Adamczak) is a young man with a problem - he dreams too much. His therapist, Dr Vangillies, explains that he spends 85 per cent of his slumber in REM sleep, the time of dreams. It dominates his nights, and waking dreams wreck his days.
A girl - with trampoline - moves in across the street. Kelly (Amanda Woodhams, who also plays Vangillies) is also troubled, but the reasons for her distress are much more obvious. She's lost her mother to cancer and her father's grief has turned to violent anger.
It's not unusual to have sympathy for a play's characters but Adamczak makes us really feel these damaged kids are entitled to a happy ending. 
In the end, Kelly cures Matt as he frees her. But Adamczak sows a last seed of doubt when, in the play's final line, Kelly tells Matt: "I'm your dream come true, baby."
And maybe she is. Or maybe that's all she is.

Link here to the complete review in The West Australian

Theatre: In a New York Minute

Devised and performed by Spontaneous Insanity

Directed by Glenn Hall

Musical director Tristen Parr

Featuring Libby Hammer, Shane Adamczak, Courtney Sage Hart, Louisa Fitzhardinge, Emmet Nichols, Nichola Renton-Weir, Ric Cairns, Rhoda Lopez, Glenn Hall and The Triple Threat; Tristen Parr, Christopher de Groot and Callum Moncrieff 

Subiaco Arts Centre Studio

4 – 6 November 2010

The Rough with the Smooth
Improvisation – “unscripted theatre” as it now likes to calls itself – is the zany cousin of the big, serious theatre family. Great company, lots of fun, but a bit, well, hit and miss. Not someone you’d consult about matters of consequence, and definitely best in small doses.

So Glenn Hall and his Spontaneous Insanity company took on an ambitious challenge mounting a full-length, two-act piece where the story elements are provided at random from the audience at the start, and with a stated aim of using improvisation to explore relationships rather than merely fish for laughs.

The night I went, the plotline ideas from the audience were: watching lightning from the roof, the 1920s, a hand-made pinball machine, and John Lennon (“Ye gods!” I muttered under my breath), and away Hall and his eight performers went.

It was a bumpy ride at times, and there were enough wrong turns to make Hall’s interventions – he acts as a sort of human GPS device, bringing the performers back into line when things are going awry ­– almost a running gag. For all that, an entertaining story emerged from it all, and most of the audience’s elements were well incorporated (though Lennon, it must be said, pretty much defeated them).

In the absence of a script to pontificate about, I broke a reviewer’s rule and bailed up some of the performers after the show. Nichola Renton-Weir (who has something of Tina Fey about her and was terrific as a frat party wallflower turned cold-blooded killer) admitted that her strongest emotion during the show was panic, and I’m sure she was right; we felt it in the audience as well.

To successfully overcome it, and somehow manage to tie together the storylines that are floating around you, you need strong cultural literacy. Courtney Sage Hart, who was a solid foil in a brother-sister gangster act to the undoubted star of the show, the expressive and spontaneous Louisa Fitzhardinge, said he was constantly mining his knowledge of noir cinema and detective fiction to get him through.

What you need most, to use a sporting analogy, is the ability to find the ball; to see where you are in the story and where you’re going to go with it. In that respect, the best of the night’s performers – Renton-Weir, Fitzhardinge, the talented, droll Shane Adamczak and, while she’s maybe not a natural actor, the charismatic jazz diva Libby Hammer – show the instincts of a Michael Barlow. Others in the company, for all their undoubted talent, were more like Nic Naitanui.

But that’s improvisation – if you aren’t ready to take the rough with the smooth, don’t buy the ticket. I’m sure Hall and Spontaneous Insanity will be back for more and, judging by this sell-out season, it’s a risk plenty of theatregoers are happy to take.

An edited version of this review appeared in The West Australian on 9.11.10 read here