Reviews

Belgian theatre company Ontroerend Goed have returned to Adelaide with £¥€$, an interactive and immersive theatre experience for the 2019 OzAsia Festival.  Since its premiere in 2017 £¥€$ has been travelling the globe and immersing audiences in Moscow, Kazakhstan, Hong Kong and Shanghai plus staging a French-speaking version as an official selection for this year’s prestigious Festival d’Avignon.

Japan’s SIRO-A brings Techno Circus to Adelaide for this year’s OzAsia Festival. It’s an hour of human agility and ability interacting with state-of-the-art technology, all choreographed to a thumping techno soundtrack. Techno Circus in many ways defies classification despite the show’s title. It has elements of dance, acrobatics, physical theatre, puppetry, clowning, mime, shadow play, sleight of hand and magic, all combined with mind-boggling visual effects.

Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues – written in the 1980s for BBC TV – put faces and names to Thoreau’s ‘lives of quiet desperation’. They are superbly written character pieces and, incredibley, are showing no signs of age. The two short and sharp pieces chosen by Brisbane’s Villanova Players give Jane Binstead and Jean Spencer a chance to polish and show off their comic skills.

To some degree history is the recollection and interpretation of individuals involved. Shakespeare claims “There is history in all men’s lives” and Voltaire says "History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes". Both of these themes are explored in the production Light by Thomas Henning and TerryandTheCuz.