FRINGE WORLD 2020

Here we go again! Welcome to Turnstile's run-down of the shows we've seen at Fringe World 2020. 

These spot reviews will often link to full pieces either on Turnstiles or Seesaw Magazine. Shows that you can still see come first, those whose runs have finished follow.

I hope that all makes sense, and that what you're reading here helps you make some of those tricky "will-I-or-won't-I" fringe choices. 

Thunderstruck ★★★★

Girl's School until Feb 16.

Whether of not you like that bruising caterwaul of an instrument, the Great Highland Bagpipe, you'll love David Colvin's semi-autobiographical story of a boy who grew up in its thrall, and the flawed genius who inspired him. Comes complete with a deliciously obscene Princess Di story.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

30 Day Free Trial ★★★½

Blue Room Theatre until Feb 8

Porn is everywhere, and it was only a matter of time and opportunity before indie darlings Charlotte Ottons and Andrew Sutherland tried their hand at it. Sort of. The result is slick, sexy and nowhere near as shallow and dehumanising as ts subject.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

A Special Day ★★★★½

Girl's School until Feb 16.

May 8, 1938 is a special day for the occupants of an apartment building in Rome as Adolf Hitler rolls into town to meet Benito Mussolini. It will be a special hour for you if you see this lovely, superbly performed and inventive play from Mexico.
Link here to my review in Seesaw  

Bernie Dieter's Little Death Club ★★★★½
WA Spiegeltent until Feb 16.
Since an infamous night in 2013 when Bernie Dieter aka Bernadette Byrne aka Jennifer Byrne from Koln via London via Warrandyte (it's true - she's just a suburban girl!) sat on my lap in a spiegeltent and  crooned something torchy in my reddening ear, I've been a helpless acolyte, drawn like a moth to the flame of her fabulous showvampship.
This new show is the apotheosis of her talent, as a performer, and as an empressario. Unlike the previous, gloriously filthy but a little rag-tag LDC, this show is as tight as a drag queen's leopard-skin cheongsam. (the drag queen in question is Art Simone, the RuPaul Drag Con "Performer of the Year", one of four guest artistes only unmemorable because of the company they kept). 
There's a funky four-piece, all the production bells and whistles but it's all Madame Dieter, swallowing the spotlight whole with her impossible eyes, her jagged mouth, her daring original songs and her fabulous ability to turn an audience into cats confronted by cream. Jesus she's good at it!
We're lucky this year to have Meow Meow in town, Amanda Palmer (the artist most like Dieter in stance and talent) too when the grown-ups festival rolls into Perth. 
Do not, under any circumstances, miss any of them.

The Gods The Gods The Gods ★★★★

De Parel Spiegeltent until Feb 9

Ragnarokkr ★★½

The Blue Room  until Feb 8

Two shows based on ancient mythology, both from companies with strings of hits behind them. One, from the Greeks is another bobbydazzler; the other, from the Vikings, not so much.
Link here to my omnibus review of both shows in Seesaw 

 On Stage Dating ★★★½

The Library at Girl's School until Feb 16.

Bron Batten is a dating machine, Ryan the accountant from the audience made all the right moves, and it all made for a swipe right night.
Link here to my review in Seesaw


Eurydice ★★★★

Shambles at the Pleasure Garden until Feb 9

Ye Gods –they've done it again! The gang who brought you the triumphant Orpheus last year are back with the other side of the great Greek myth.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

Amateur Hour ★★★★
The Rechabite Sundays Jan 26 – Feb 16  

The South African duo Jemma Kahn and Glen Biderman Pam are bringing their wonderful The Epicene Butcher back to the Fringe this year (see below), but their late-night show is far from a throwaway. A deep dark take on talent shows, it’s terribly funny and more than a little savage. It'll be a hard ticket to get.

Franz Kafka’s 1917 short story, A Report to an Kafka’s Ape ★★★★½
Franz Kafka’s 1917 short story, A Report to an Academy, is made for the stage, and the resulting adaptation by Phala O. Phala (who also directs) of Ian Johnston’s translation is both true to the original and revelatory.

The story, a parable of the absorption of the outsider into the dominant culture, and the emptiness it results in, is given dramatic force and a fascinating horror because the outsider of the play is an ape (Tony Bonani Miyambo) who survives and escapes captivity by literally becoming a man. What he gains, though, is not freedom but merely escape, a way out. A free ape becomes a prisoner without chains, but with a great emptiness in his heart.

By all reports, Kafka’s story is an allegory of the “westernization” of Jews in Europe, but Phila and Miyambo have transposed it to the African experience. It’s an uncomfortable experience to see a black man playing an ape (Australian audiences will be drawn inexorably to the vilification of Adam Goodes in this context) but Miyambo’s performance has such dignity and self-respect that the insight and rare beauty of Kafka’s language is a joy to experience.

It’s a marvelous performance, full of technical quality and humour (a mild "beware the front row" warning is appropriate, unless you have fleas) and a must-see opener for the Fringe.

Body Rights ★★★½
Isn’t it a marvel that one of the most eagerly-awaited productions at this year’s Fringe World should be from the WA Youth Theatre Company!

 It’s all due, of course, to their spellbinding and brilliantly executed Rest, the winner of the Martin Sims award at last year’s festival.

While Body Rights doesn’t reach the heights of Rest, the strengths and sense of purpose of WAYTCO is on show once again with these four short plays about bodies and the right of young people to determine what happens to and with them.

WAYTCO’s artistic director James Berlyn created and directed three of the pieces: Will the story of a young singer facing an extraordinary decision as his voice starts to break; Adrian’s Soul, a series of one-on-one meetings between the audience and young performers with stories to tell; and ARCO an exploration of the life and thoughts of a person with autism performed by the autistic performer Adam Kelly.

The fourth piece, Boxed In, co-created and directed by Phoebe Sullivan, explores the work young women put into their bodies, and the fears that at least partly drive them.

The plays take place in two rooms at Girl’s School, with the staging, large cast and audience expertly mashalled by stage manager Anastasia Julien-Martial.

Adrian’s Soul is closest in spirit to Rest and ARCO provides the night’s most striking and euphoric moments, but all the pieces, and the whole production, are valuable, finely delivered and well worth your attention.

Talkback ★★★

It's devilishly hard to stage anything supernatural in a tiny black box theatre like The Blue Room, especially during fringe frenzy with no time to set effects, and especially when its a thriller. But director Elise Wilson and her actors (Monica Main a standout) make a decent fist of the story of a radio medium whose past literally comes back to haunt her.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

French Over ★★★

Izzy McDonald, the creator of the Martin Sims award-winning Bus Boy, returns with the story of a bonfire and the people who annually are drawn to it. Singular staging, a powerful cast (Alicia Osyka outstanding) and quality dialogue make for an interesting and touching piece, despite some structural flaws.
Link here to my review in Seesaw

Zack Adams: Love Song for Future Girl ★★★

I'm a huge fan of Shane Adamczak, the comedian, actor and writer and alter-ego of Zack Adams (as his name suggests), but, though Love Songs is funny, sad and a bit wise, I've got some reservations...
Link here to my review in Seesaw

The Epicene Butcher ★★★★½

The Epicene Butcher comes in an exotic form – the venerable Japanese story-telling art of Kamishibai, literally “paper drama”.

The show begins traditionally enough, with the story of a fat, cranky monk and a man who travels a hundred miles for the answer to life. Things get decidedly weird thereafter, with a brutally pornographic story of a hentai fantasy girl and the lonely boy who imagines her, and a grimly hilarious reworking of the now classic quest by Mario to rescue Princess Peach.

Most powerful of all is the title story, a haunting epic of love, perversion and cannibalism that silenced the audience. They stayed quiet for the wordless, black-and-white Fukushima, a sombre telling of Japan’s nuclear disaster. At the end, a rambunctious, irreverent telling of the life of Nelson Mandela in pidgin Japanese brought a happy crowd back from the disparate cultures and climes this extraordinary little show had taken us to.

Quokka Apocalypse★★★
A bunch of endangered native animals hatch a plot to destroy our water desalination plants and make us join them in extinction. I can buy that.Link here to my review in Seesaw

Orpheus ★★★★½

The best show at the 2019 Fringe, the exuberant, propulsive retelling of the Orpheus myth sat in a North-of-England Pub returns, along with two more shows inspired by those clever old Greeks, Eurydice and The Gods The Gods The Gods.

Make sure you see it – I bet you’ll want to see the others as well.
Here's my review in Seesaw last year. 

Coming soon to Turnstiles:

Ballads Banksias and Beauty

Adult Storytime #3
Star Power

THANK YOU!

I really appreciate you calling by Turnstiles to see what's going on in theatre and other popular arts in Perth.

Despite the absence of new postings on the site, I want to assure you that I'm not dead and that Turnstiles is also still alive, even if it hasn't been kicking lately.

There's a very good reason for this; I'm one of the reviewers and arts journalists who's migrated to the great new arts website Seesaw, and you can find all my latest reviews and other musings – along with those of other quality writers – by going to

seesawmag.com.au
(don't forget the "mag")

I promise I'll get Turnstiles back up-to-date over the coming holidays, and look forward to keeping you in the loop over what is shaping to be an exciting 2020 festival season and beyond. In the meantime – see you on the Seesaw!  

Theatre: Floor Thirteen

By Elise Wilson

Directed by Marshall Stay

Performed by Kylie Bywaters, Tamara Creasey, Courtney Henri, Christopher Moro and Jordan Valentini

Blue Room Theatre

Until 13 July

Elise Wilson is on some sort of trajectory. The 2018 WAAPA performing arts graduate dashed downtown from the Mt Lawley campus to the Blue Room where she’s been making waves as an actor in shows like Hive Mind and Grace (with much more to come this year). Even some of her purposeful performances as the theatre’s usher during the fringe stopped the chatter in the Blue Room’s foyer – now that’s an achievement!  

She’s also found time to write, and Floor Thirteen, her first full-length play, is the result. It’s an auspicious debut.

A young, smart and aspirational lawyer, Phoebe (Kylie Bywater), is heading home from a party at her client’s apartment to celebrate his win in the big court case she’d been working on. She’s more than a little drunk, and much more than a little unsettled, so the last thing she needs is the lift to stick, somewhere between the fourteenth and twelfth floor.

Help is at hand, and soon a reassuring technician’s voice is keeping her calm while he sorts out the problem.

But calm isn’t on the agenda for Phoebe’s night, and the reason isn’t because she’s stuck in a lift. It’s what has happened that night, before she got in the lift, that has got her seriously unglued, and it’s finding out why that was – why that really was ­–­ that is Wilson’s story.

Floor Thirteen is about memory, how we build it and how it peels away like onionskin to expose the truth.

Wilson has worked closely with the producer/director/designer Marshall Stay and Bywaters, also recent WAAPA grads, and the result – the core of the production – is tight, clear and tense. Stay’s set, an all-but-transparent box representing the lift is a perfect performance space for Bywaters, and she brings Phoebe to nervy, jagged life. Stay’s ever-so-slightly-distorted soundscape and Scott McArdle’s lighting design amplify the uneasy energy and edginess of the text, and Bywaters’ performance.

However, there’s more to Floor Thirteen than one actor playing one stranded woman; as the unstable layers of Phoebe’s memory of events are exposed, they are performed as tableaux by an ensemble of performers – Tamara Creasey, Courtney Henri, Christopher Moro and Jordan Valentini – circling the lift. They silently mouth the conversations Phoebe remembers, or concocts, and give physical form to the shifting reality of events.

It’s tightly devised (“movement dramaturgy” – a new one for me – by Jessica Russell) and performed, but I’m not convinced it adds materially to the text or our understanding of its voice.

I’ve great admiration for the performing arts course at WAAPA, and the work it does to train students across the range of disciplines involved in theatre making. Because of the mix of forms and performance it employs, Floor Thirteen felt like an extension of that work, and that training, rather than a fully autonomous production. .

Whether that makes for the best use of these talents, or whether it best serves the text, is an unanswered question.  I left Floor Thirteen feeling I’d like to see it again, but this time with just the story, the actor and the technician’s disembodied voice, to make that judgement.

Theatre: The Double ★★★★

Written and directed by Clare Testoni

Lighting designed by Rhiannon Petersen

Sound design by Jou Lui

Performed by Phoebe Sullivan, Amanda Watson and Michelle Aitken

Blue Room Theatre

Phoebe Sullivan meets her double

The Blue Room theatre has broken with tradition and combined both its 2019 seasons (not counting its Summer Nights fringe festival and Winter Nights development offerings) into one year-long celebration of WA’s independent contemporary theatre.

Whether that’s clever marketing or sheer one-upmanship, the fifteen productions from now until December shape as an impressive, attention-grabbing body of work.

And its opening production, Clare Testoni’s sci-fai fable, The Double, is a perfect pilot for the series.

Testoni has made a quantum leap as a deviser and executor of theatre over the past couple of years, exploiting her skill as a shadow puppeteer, image-maker and imaginative interpreter of fairy tales.

Through it her work has become provocative, sophisticated and highly entertaining. Her developing power was demonstrated last year by Tale of Tales, a highlight of the Blue Room season, and the startling intergalactic panorama she created with Tim Watts for The Last Great Hunt’s Stay With Us.

The Double is even more ambitious, incorporating digital imagery and masking in the Faustian story of a struggling actor who sells her image to a megalithic corporation, risking her identity and soul in the process.

It’s richly intriguing to see how Testoni has used her skills and interests in new ways, so that you’re rarely aware that The Double essentially remains puppetry and her story a fairy tale.

Her three actors, Phoebe Sullivan, Amanda Watson and Michelle Aitken, morph skilfully into the central character, Victoria, her computer generated doppelganger, Vivy, and the relatives and friends, agents and corporate geeks who regale her (Aitken, in particular, is strange and compelling).

We most often see them as distorted projected images, accentuating the shape-shifting, manipulated realities of modern marketing and image creation. Testoni, who also directs, handles the metatheatrics of this process with aplomb

The story progresses with unhurried clarity through all this technology and theatrics, even if it finally doesn’t yet quite achieve its emotional potential. It provides a solid platform for Testoni’s Cartesian thesis on the reality of self in a digitally generated world,.

In fairytales and science fiction, the creator has to go beyond present reality to fetch her story, but, for The Double, Testoni doesn’t have to go too far to find it.

So much so that I couldn’t help wondering, as I watched this pertinent and excellently delivered production, how Gabrielle Miller must feel when she sees herself, everywhere, as the Trivago Girl.

Theatre: You Know We Belong Together

Julia Hales

by Julia Hales with Finn O’Branagáin and Clare Watson
Black Swan Theatre Company
Directed by Clare Watson
Set and costume designer Tyler Hill
Lighting designer Joe Lui
Composer and sound designer Rachael Dease
Performed by Julia Hales, Joshua Bott, Patrick Carter, Tina Fielding, Mark Junor, Melissa Junor, Lauren Marchbank and Hermione Merry
Heath Ledger Theatre until March 31  

There is wonderful warmth about You Know We Belong Together. It envelops the audience, creating a shared, joyous experience of the rarest kind in theatre.
Its lead artist Julia Hales has Down Syndrome, as do her co-performers Joshua Bott, Patrick Carter, Lauren Marchbank, Tina Fielding, Melissa and Mark Junor.
Hales’s research into love and belonging for people with DS blossomed with the contributions of the writer Finn O’Branagáin and director Clare Watson into a genuinely impressive piece of verbatim theatre about life, family, hopes, desire, dreams and the part DS plays in all of them.
Much of the show consists of pre-recorded interviews with the performers about these life matters. (It’s important to realize that life expectancy for people with DS has gone from 25 years as recently as the 1980s to over 60 today, bringing with it a whole host of new challenges and opportunities.)
But let me dispel any suspicion that this is a dry, worthy, didactic piece – far from it. It overflows with happiness and real charm as these lovely and loving people tell us their stories. Some of them – the gorgeous romance of the Junors from Augusta is an outstanding example – are deeply moving; others are funny, sexy and sad.
It’s simply and shrewdly designed by Tyler Hill and lit by Joe Lui. Rachael Dease has composed an effective, unobtrusive soundtrack for the show. 
These are stories of people who are as whole and emotionally alive as any of us.
Hales’ obsession with the eternally-running TV soap Home and Away locates and drives the show. Her real friends meet in the Summer Bay café of her imagination; its beach and the real one near her family’s Eagle Bay holiday house fold together in her mind. Her own tragedies and the melodramatic happenings in the fictional lives of H & A reflect each other, and the final scene (I won’t spoil the surprise and sheer euphoria of it) wraps and ties a ribbon around this little gift of a play.
This season is an extended encore of the show's premiere at the 2018 Perth Festival. It's success there has also earned it a relocation to the mainstage Heath Ledger Theatre.
 It was a a delightful and touching show on its first outing (this review is essentially the same as it was then), and has lost nothing this time around.     

Theatre: RE-MEMBER ME ★★★★

Dickie Beau
Studio Underground until March 3

Lip Sync. That imitation of live we associate with Milli Vanilli and dreadful drag acts approximating what the mouth does when singing, oh, you know, Total Eclipse of the Heart. If you can’t sing it, sync it.
It’s not something that should be seen on polite stages.
Until there was Dickie Beau.
Mr Beau has made lip sync an art form, and he brings his extraordinary felicity with it to a riveting remembrance of Hamlets past that is, at once, a fascinating quiz show (whose was that voice?), a forensic deconstruction of actors and their most prized role and, ultimately, a sad, loving eulogy for a glorious talent lost to the scourge of AIDS.
He has interviewed actors, agents, directors and critics (I’m pleased he gives more recognition to the significance of our beleaguered occupation in the ecosystem of the theatre than is customary!) and plays their responses back lip-synced, with uncanny verisimilitude, every half-cough, glottal stop and stammer captured exactly. His recreation extends from the lips to the eyebrows, the tilt of the head, the gestures of hand and body to create an almost spooky facsimile of the original. The result is mime of a unique and daring kind.
It’s a great entertainment, of course, excruciatingly funny and camp, but it somehow transcends fun and games and, ironically, gives both authority and ephemerality to what is said and those who say it.
Two long sequences of Beau filmed as different people projected in a row (There’s Gielgud – the only voice Beau didn’t record himself – and McKellan, the agent John Wood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s dresser Stephen Ashby and the directors Richard Eyre and John Wood) speaking about the stage, and Hamlet particularly, reminded me of the wry and touching Nothing Like a Dame, with Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench, Joan Plowright and Maggie Smith reminiscing to camera, occasionally to each other, about life in the theatre.
For Beau to elicit his subject’s often raw responses, then capture them so precisely, is a singular achievement (even if the filmed segments occupy a little too much of the show’s hour).
When their conversation turned to Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor who became a star in Chariots of Fire and played Hamlet, memorably, twice before succumbing to AIDS in 1989 at 40, the show shifts into a lower, more sombre, gear.
Beau wanders the stage, fitfully trying to reconstruct figures from body parts scattered around it, while a figure of Andrewes lies on his hospital deathbed behind him. Beau is saying a lot here – about the transitory nature of life and beauty, about gay culture, about what’s real and what’s illusion.
If you’re not ready for it, it’s unsettling and indigestible, but Beau’s thesis, drawn from the character of Hamlet and that of those who play him – or lip sync those who do –is far more ambitious than first meets the eye.
I was startled, and thrilled, by the conclusion of RE-MEMBER ME; the great lines, not from Shakespeare, but from T.S. Eliot (who, as Beau reminds us in the programme, was no fan of Hamlet): 
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
Dickie Beau will never be Prince Hamlet, but his peculiar talent, and the use to which he puts it in RE-MEMBER ME, shows that he is no fool.
 

Theatre: A Ghost in My Suitcase ★★★½

Barking Gecko Theatre

Heath Ledger Theatre until March 3

Perth’s terrific theatre for young people, Barking Gecko, has been a frequent contributor to the Perth Festival, and it’s only fitting that it’s latest production appears in a year that has seen something like ten “Made in WA” productions gather critical acclaim and, even more encouragingly, box office numbers.

A Ghost in My Suitcase deserves both. The story, adapted by Vanessa Bates from the novel by Gabrielle Wang,  of a Chinese/French-Australian girl, Celeste (Alice Keohavong) who returns with her mother’s ashes to the small town of her family and the house of her Por Por – grandmother – Madame Bao (Amanda Mar) in China is entertaining — for both its younger and older audience – and enlightening about the culture and mores of both our countries.

Her adventures, her rivalry and eventual alliance with Ting Ting Shen (Yilin Kong), the great-grand-daughter of the man who ruined her family, is told in a style familiar to lovers of Sino-swashbuckling cinema and the supernatural elements it often contains.

While the narrative falters occasionally, and the climactic battle is a little underwhelming (especially in comparison to what has gone before) and predictable, the story of ghosts, ancient feuds and the triumph of courage is well told, gripping enough and lots of fun. I’ll leave the details for you to discover when you go!

What makes this show is its gorgeous imagery projected onto boxes expertly manoeuvred into position on an otherwise bare stage, the expressive soundscape created by the ubiquitous Rachel Dease and the fine performances by all three cast members.

The cleverly devised, knockabout staging of the show by co-directors Ching Ching Ho and Barking Gecko’s departing AD Matt Edgerton is illuminated by the visual design of media artist Sohan Ariel Hayes, richly coloured and textured, evocative and often remarkably three-dimensional. One scene, as our heroes float through the canals of Zhujiajiao Water Town is as cunningly constructed as it is breathtaking.

Keohavong, Ma and Kong are all excellent, and well supported by Freida Lee and John Shrimpton in the plays minor roles. The lithe, athletic Kong, a dancer by training and previous experience, is especially effective in a performance straight out of the wuxia playbook.

A Ghost in My Suitcase has already gathered many admirers on its journey to the Perth Festival. The short season here will win it many more.