Reviews

Women with Big Hits - Sixties Edition

Adelaide Fringe Festival. Australian Premiere/ Auditorium at Diverse-City @ West Village. Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th March, 2022

Part of the enchantment of Adelaide’s Fringe is the diversity of performers coupled with venues that allow going out to be a multi-faceted event. This is one such show. The Auditorium at Diverse-City is a Local Heritage listed building and has been used for decades as a venue providing licensed bar and food facilities, so for this event, patrons chose from a 'Show Only' or 'Meal and Show' ticket.

Venus in Fur

By David Ives. Adelaide Fringe Festival 2022. The Arch at Holden Street Theatres – Hindmarsh. March 1 – 20, 2022

Venus in Fur is a gutsy, psychological thriller with just a touch of kink! Set on a bare stage, relieved by a table and chairs, a seemingly innocent late audition rapidly escalates and we are left with some questions to puzzle over - Who is Vanda? How does she know the play off-by-heart? Who is really the director and the auditionee?

Mad Woman

Written & performed by Rosaleen Cox. Fringe Rebound. Fringe Common Rooms, Ballroom, Trades Hall, Melbourne. 9, 11 & 13 March 2022

‘Mad Woman’?  Should it be ‘Sad Woman’? 

F*cking Ancient

Written and performed by Maggie McCormack. Adelaide Fringe, on demand. Until 20 March 2022

What do you do when forced to remain in lockdown over the past year or so? Create a world premiere online one-woman comedy of course. Performer and writer Maggie McCormack created F*CKING ANCIENT, inspired by her very personal exploration of the age we live in and our obsession with youth culture – which the pandemic forcing us to spend endless hours online has only served to reinforce – as Maggie says: "Being on Zoom and working from home, and looking at ourselves on screen all day!"

La Juive (The Jewess)

By Fromental Halévy. Opera Australia. Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House. March 9 – 26, 2022

A Jew and Christian in love seems a rather trivial affair on which to build three hours of gloriously dark, grandiloquent opera. Fromental Halévy’s 1835 work, set centuries earlier in Constance, stirs up thunderous choral and soaring solos from the lovers and their two feuding religious communities. 

This OA/Opera National de Lyon co-production matches most modern versions by updating these old bigotries into the racial horrors of the 20th Century – when the Nazis shot such lovers.

Freud’s Last Session

By Mark St. Germain. Directed by Hailey McQueen. Clock and Spiel Productions. Riverside Theatre. 9-12 March, 2022

Mark St. Germain is a prolific American writer of plays, musicals, and documentary films. All of them are much acclaimed, many of them involve famous people. His play Becoming Dr Ruth  tells the story Dr Ruth Westheimer, who escaped from Nazi Germany in the Kinderstransport, went on to Israel and America, and eventually became a pioneering radio and television sex therapist.

Bone Cage

Adelaide Fringe Festival 2022. Stage Secrets. Watch from home.

Bone Cage offers two alternatives to view the production, live audience and ‘watch from home’. I was unable to attend the live performance so this review is based on the online option.

An Unseasonable Fall of Snow

By Gary Henderson. Adelaide Fringe. Presented by Boyslikeme Productions. Holden Street Theatres. 8-20 March 2022

There’s a bare room, with a table and a few chairs. A man sits reading a file, drinking his coffee. A white board has the letters ‘AJP’ written on it, and through one of the two doors, another man peers through, looking nervous. ‘Liam?’ asks the man with a file, and he nods in agreement.

Nearer The Gods

By David Williamson. Ensemble Theatre. March 4 – April 23, 2022

In his 54th play, David Williamson here turns away from his usual focus on Australia’s contemporary middle class ways and instead looks skywards at Isaac Newton’s theory of celestial mechanics, circa 1684.

He made a similar leap into more intellectual worlds, with plays like Dead White Males and Heretic, back in the 1990’s.  I admired them, some critics didn’t. 

Hamlet

By William Shakespeare. Bell Shakespeare at the Playhouse, Sydney Opera House. Director: Peter Evans. 5 March – 2 April, 2022

Returning to the Playhouse after two COVID-jammed, performance-free years comes this tight production of Shakespeare’s most famous play. A packed, masked audience showed its standing approval of a three-hour performance featuring ghosts, multiple murders and betrayals, not to mention some of the greatest lines, scenes and soliloquies ever written.