Reviews

There have been many important musical events in my life, none more so than seeing Robyn Archer playing Annie 1 in Seven Deadly Sins by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht to open the Space theatre at the Adelaide Festival Centre in 1974. I later discovered that this was her first role, so I feel honoured to have seen her in this iconic piece of German theatre.

I have been fascinated with this Australian chanteuse ever since. She is equally at home with German cabaret as she is with country music which is her roots.

Where Water Once Was is a domestic drama with edge. Nicely directed and well-acted, it tells of a family struggling to deal with change as a mother succumbs to dementia and her adult children struggle to deal with a crumbling family home which holds dark secrets.

1933.  Professor John Halder (David Tenant), a specialist in Goethe at the University of Frankfurt, is a ‘good’ man – liberal, rational, moral – or so he thinks.  He is initially dismayed by Hitler but figures the Nazis won’t last and all this anti-Jewish thing likewise – it’s just ridiculous.  These are ‘rational’ but self-serving opinions.

Sally Ford and the Idiomatics – Patrick Cronin and Michael Havir – fill the Space Theatre with a fusion of music, song, and spoken word, offering decades of musical style to underscore Ford’s observations through poetry and prose.