A Promenade of Shorts: Season 3

Nine plays in one night? I thought Adelaide Fringe was next month? Red Phoenix have returned from their fallow year with a festival of theatre starring almost thirty of Adelaide’s best actors. Ninety minutes of drama, comedy, and a homage to Beckett filled three distinct spaces at Goodwood Theatre and Studios, the venue buzzing with people as if it was Fringe opening weekend.

On checking in to the outdoor box office, each patron receives a coloured sticker, allocating them to one of three audiences, who are guided to their seats by a ‘tour guide’. Even before the house lights went down, Anne Doherty, Kate Prescott and Olivia Jane Parker deliver wonderful and intriguing characters that both entertain and care for each group.

Each venue within Goodwood offers three ten minute plays, with crazy quick set pieces between each one, before a short interval where plenty of ‘what did you think?’ and ‘which ones have you just seen?’ conversations bubble over the flowing drinks from the bar. Then your guide hustles you into the next space for the next three plays, another interval, another drink – and then the final three plays to end the evening.

It's a great concept, and the considered wrangling of so many people through the narrow spaces of Goodwood makes it all move smoothly. It’s the third outing for Red Phoenix in this format - this mini-festival first came to fruition in October 2020, when pandemic restrictions on gatherings meant staging a play with a commercially acceptable audience was nigh impossible. Red Phoenix worked with Holden Street Theatres to make use of three different spaces to ensure no more than thirty people at a time were occupying the enclosed area. This meant ninety patrons could see live theatre at a time many in the world weren’t even allowed to leave their homes. This approach was warmly welcomed by theatre-starved audiences – and the festival was repeated in 2023, before this third instalment.

But what of the plays themselves? Red Phoenix’s ethos is to present works that have never before been performed in South Australia and it’s a challenging remit to do that for so many short plays.

The Main Theatre starts with ‘In Farce’, written by Steven Bucko and directed here by Norm Caddick – a moment in a hotel lobby where all the usual elements of this theatre style are thrown together. There’s no subtlety (one of the characters is called Plot Device) and it has the expected combination of hiding truths behind multiple doors. It’s perhaps telling of the genre that these caricatures can retell the basis of entire longform plays in just ten minutes. Adam Tuominen stands out as the unashamedly amoral Husband, together with Sean Smith’s impeccable sound operation.

The second play takes the infidelity theme to a darker corner, Alica Zorkovic directs a Dorothy Lambert play, ‘Chilled Wine’, with three women (more ‘Desperate’ than suburban housewives) meeting over a glass of Pinot Grigio to gossip about their love lives.

The third in the more traditional theatre space is ‘Go To The Light’, an immensely dark statement on our narcissistic social media-fixated society, also directed by Zorkovic. Malcolm Walton has the most fun as the dying father with unlikeable adult children.

In The Bar, the audience is seated along the walls facing a traverse staging. Three short double-handers directed sensitively by Hayley Horton offer more intriguing humanity. ‘Bottle For A Special Occasion’ by William Kovacsik brings Judith (Lyn Wilson) into a wine shop, looking for a suitable bottle for her husband. Martin, the owner, played superbly by Stuart Pearce, provides advice and comfort for the woman who knows very little about vintages and grapes. Wilson and Pearce are beautiful together, and whilst many of the other plays in this promenade are intent on stroking the funny bone, these ten minutes touch the heart.

‘On Queue’, by Morey Norkin, is a short piece of absurdist theatre with more than a nod to the style and form of playwright Samuel Beckett. Jack Robins and Jethro Pidd are in a queue for the ‘Thing’ and punctuate the silences with pointless questions. Pidd’s physicality is good and plays against Robins’ staid character.

‘Choices’ by James McLindon is another dark statement on contemporary society and choice. Rebecca Kemp is an excellent Debt Counsellor trying to persuade her prospective client (Laura Lines) to sign up to her ‘disruptive’ product. Lines is great in her character’s slow realisation of what that signature means.

The third venue is The Studio, a black box space where the front row of the tiered seating is right on the performing space. Red Phoenix’s Artistic Director, Libby Drake, directs three wildly different short plays on family and relationships.

‘Road Trip’ by Jan Probst sees Lindsay Dunn’s Allen setting up for a long drive around America with his wife Mary (played with great sarcasm by Joanne St Clair) before being joined by other family members crowding in the car. It’s a clever piece of make-believe within a play and the ensemble create lots of laughs by playing it straight.

It’s also a brilliant decision to have this cast reset the stage for the subsequent plays, never breaking character as the lights stay on to bring another minute of hilarity.

The filling between the two comedies in this space is Susan Middaugh’s ‘When I Fall In Love It Will Be…’, a park-bench conversation between two people grieving their partners with dementia. Lisa Lanzi brings a huge amount of emotion to Florence who is witnessing her husband do things he’s never done before whilst not recognising his wife. Adrian Barnes’ Ed is a husband who has come to terms with his wife doing the same, finding the positives in her declining mental health. Lanzi’s and Barnes’ chemistry is gentle and believable – a touching duo trying to navigate new experiences long after they thought they’d done it all.

The final play in this space is the hilarious and brilliantly performed ‘Mrs Thrale Lays On… Tea!’ Sharon Malujlo’s Mrs Thrale entertains Dr Johnson, played with a wicked glint in his eye by Red Phoenix’s own Michael Eustice, whilst maidservant Polly (Zoe Battersby) waits on them. The dialogue is simply the names of the three characters, repeated over and over again, but it is delivered with such inflection and incredible physicality from all three actors that the audience understands everything that is going on. The interplay between Malujlo and Eustice is natural and superb, as is Battersby’s ability to convey embarrassment with just her eyes and mouth without speaking a word. This is such a fun piece of theatre and perfect for this short format.

This Promenade of Shorts is an excellent curtain opener to Adelaide theatre’s 2026 seasons, perfect to get a taste for something different to what can feel like the same plays on rotation, and an immensely entertaining and thought-provoking night out at the theatre. 

Review by Mark Wickett