Reviews

The Dhol Foundation Festival Theatre, October 2nd In their first Adelaide performance since headlining Womadelaide in 2004, The Dhol Foundation returned to our fair shores as part of this year’s OzAsia Festival. Despite the long break, local support for the drumming outfit and their addictive blend of electronic Punjabi funk clearly hasn’t cooled, with palpable audience excitement from the get-go.

It’s a tried and true recipe for dramatic comedy. Put two people from opposite poles into a small space and watch the sparks fly. Neil Simon did it with The Odd Couple and David Williamson has succeeded with flying colours in Rhinestone Rex and Miss Monica. In this case Monica (played by Georgie Parker) is a highly strung member of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra on injury leave and Gary, aka Rhinstone Rex (played by Glenn Hazeldine), is a retired country and western singer.

Really silly! Really bizarre and silly! Vaguely organised chaos! Australian comedy direct from Edinburgh Fringe acclaim. Backbone Joe is a punch-drunk Aussie bare-knuckle bush town boxer, who fights all comers in a local abattoir, which doubles as a boxing club. Did he kill his wife in a fit of passion? Detective Von Trapp arrives in the remote bush town to investigate. If that sounds even vaguely logical, I apologise.

Experimental theatre often fails because of a lack of story and character arcs, not so Underground, which stakes itself in different territory. In a word: brilliant. Reminiscent of ABC3's The Tribe, the underground attracts all the people society wants to forget: gang members, sexual fetishists, paranoids, schizophrenics, political agitators, alcoholics, drug addicts, homosexuals, depressives, nationalists and suicides.