Postcard from Sydney (3)

ATF Diary: Thurs 21 Jan

On Thursday morning I sleep in (WA body clock still three hours behind) and miss the third morning Keynote Address, by Richard Frankland. I feel guilty, but decide to take my time and do my knee physiotherapy exercises before catching the bus back to the Seymour Centre. I’ve got another big day at the Forum ahead and another Sydney Festival show to see that night.

When I arrive I have a catchup morning tea with a Perth independent theatre colleague. We talk about the challenges of doing what we do, especially in her case as a female director who’s interested in group-devised work with local writers rather than the currently dominant model of young male auteur directors with strong visual preconceptions and an interest in re-imagining classics.  We also talk about the prospect of hosting an independent theatre festival in Perth each year or perhaps bienially. What better place for indies across the country to convene in winter than the city at the edge of the world?

After morning tea I head down to the black-box Reginald Theatre for ‘Digital Frontiers’, a Breakout Session with a panel featuring a Resident Artist in Education with a major company, a writer with some experience in multimedia, and the creative producer of a venue that recently hosted a festival of live art and another ‘festival’ that experimented with international digital collaborations. Someone sitting to my right is busily using a hand-held digital device, and after a few minutes I ask her politely if she’d mind switching it off as I can’t concentrate on what the speakers are saying. She apologies and does so without protest. After a few minutes someone to my left starts doing the same thing, so I repeat the same request, and he looks at me silently for a moment before complying.

The artist in education on the panel talks about a schools project involving digital workshops that didn’t work, and another that did work involving two audiences, one of live participants and a second audience observing the first one ‘live’ onscreen. The multimedia writer then describes a performance in which a ‘fake’ panel discussion with a live audience was ‘hijacked’ halfway through (presumably through digital devices) by virtual characters advocating internet freedom. I don’t quite understand the details of the event (as at this stage I’m still being distracted by the flickering device of the man on my left), but apparently the audience rose up in protest against the digital hijackers and voted that they be ‘deleted’ so that the live panel discussion could continue. Our speaker offers this as an example of how multimedia can successfully create a new kind of performance; but I’m not sure that it isn’t on the contrary an example of an audience wanting to return to an unmediated live event. The creative producer then describes how most of the digital collaborations she recently hosted at her venue ended up using comparatively little ‘live’ digital interaction because of the vagaries of skype connections and time zones, and instead mostly relied on occasionally exchanging emails.

During the discussion I raise my hand and ask the panellists if they’re concerned about the ecological, social, psychological and physical health impacts of digital technology, given the back-up electricity demands required by 24-hour global internet servers; the environmental and social justice infringements involved in extracting raw materials and their manufacture in underdeveloped countries; and the crippling effect of our widespread addiction to hand-held screens. The panel agree but don’t have any answers. Neither do I, except to reflect that digital technology is no environmental panacea or passport to artistic or political freedom. In this respect, digital devices are like cars: we have to learn how to moderate and perhaps even regulate their use.

After the discussion, the man to my left introduces himself and tells me that he found my request to switch off his device ‘confronting’. I apologize for confronting him, and we have a polite discussion about the issue. He informs me that there’s a ‘live’ Twitter feed going on throughout the forum across different venues, and that I’ve infringed on his ‘democratic right’ to participate in the virtual conversation. I ask him what he thinks about my ‘democratic right’ to attend the actual session I’ve chosen as a member of a ‘live’ audience without being distracted, and he suggests that I can always sit somewhere else. I silently reflect on the fact that there’s a double standard here. As with the use of digital technology onstage, its use in the audience creates an ontological hole in the shared experience of live performance, including public discussion forums. We agree it’s a complex issue and part amicably, but I can feel which way the wind is blowing. Perhaps ‘democracy’ and ‘live performance’ are two more terms that need to be articulated and differentiated a little more carefully.

*

After lunch I head back down to the Reginald for another Breakout Sessions, ‘Who Owns The Story?’ The facilitator is a director and former artistic director with a special interest in community and cross-cultural collaboration (and a previous ATF curator); the panel includes two more artistic directors, an Aboriginal actor and director, and a verbatim theatre maker.

My heart sinks as the facilitator spends the first ten minutes of the session inviting people in the audience to come down to the stage and write questions for the panel up on a whiteboard before the discussion has even begun. My spirits lift again when the first artistic director panellist begins to speak about her experience of being invited to direct a show in Mexico with a company most of whose members had direct or indirect experience of being abducted or terrorised. When she questioned her own appropriateness as a director, the leader of the company countered that it was precisely in her capacity as an outsider that they valued her artisic perspective. 

The discussion that follows wrestles with the Protean question of cultural appropriation, artistic rights and individual responsibility. The verbatim theatre maker is up-front about her own right and responsibility to edit and stage documentary material, shape the story and create the final performance. The Aboriginal actor and writer is more ambivalent about the question of rights and responsibilities, and the other artistic director on the panel acknowledges that things are ‘messy’ but thinks they’re better for being so. I’m not so sure.

When question-time comes, the topics on the whiteboard are quickly left behind. I put up my hand a couple of times but the facilitator tells me I’ll need to ‘jump in’ and then fields the discussion back to another questioner. Eventually I seize my opportunity, and suggest there’s a difference between the form of storytelling (which is the work of the artist) and the content of the story (which can come from anywhere and perhaps doesn’t ultimately belong to anyone).

I cite the example of a verbatim theatre piece I worked on that was based on interviews with asylum seekers. We gave the participants right of veto over the raw transcripts, but not over the finished script. I use as counter-example a solo show I wrote and performed that involved Aboriginal characters, local language and an indigenous dreaming story that I myself dreamed up. I involved an Aboriginal consultant from the area where the story was set, who contributed to the content and encouraged me to do what I wanted. After the final performance another Aboriginal colleague in the audience (who happens to be the panelist who’s sitting in front of me, and who now smiles and acknowledges the coincidence) confronted me and objected to the stereotyped Aboriginal characters in the story. I defended myself at the time by saying that the story and characters were based on real people and events, but acknowledged that ‘my story’ had offended him and was perhaps inevitably prejudiced by my own cultural perspective. As I tell this story, I think of The Secret River and Rachael Maza’s response in her speech a couple of days ago to what she saw as the play’s unconscious perpetuation of prejudice. As I understand it, though, this is an argument for Aboriginal people telling their side of the story as well; not for claims of ownership, censorship or shutting down the debate.

In summary: I suggest that as artists we’re responsible for our own acts of storytelling and should be prepared to wear that responsibility, rather than censoring each other or ourselves. I want to hear a response from the panellists, but the discussion is shut down by the facilitator: we need to move on, we’re running out of time, we know the answers already, or think we do.

My Aboriginal colleague on the panel offers to continue the conversation later. After the session, I wander up to him for a chat, but one of the other (white) panellists monopolizes him. She says we need to understand that for Aboriginal people ‘owning a story’ is like ‘owning a house’. I’m not convinced by this analogy.  I feel uneasy about the implications as to who can or can’t tell particular stories. I recognise that traditional communities lay claim to traditional stories, storytelling (and other) roles and practices, but I’m not sure it’s a simple question of property, or even propriety. Once again, I feel a need to differentiate: between the cultural and even cultic value of stories or works of art and their aesthetic, political, personal or even exchange value. There’s no simple rule that cuts across these categories, and I’m not comfortable with the idea of shibboleths and taboos.

Up until now I’ve always thought ‘political correctness’ was a straw-man invented by the reactionary right, but right now I feel like I’m up to my neck in it; and interestingly it’s not coming from the indigenous or multicultural delegates but from the dominant ‘white’ cultural gatekeepers, custodians and ‘facilitators’. Perhaps I’m just an inveterate contrarian (over dinner that night a friend affectionately refers to my ‘sheer bloody-mindedness’) but once again (as with the session on digital frontiers) I feel like identity politics and ‘group’ rights can lead to a form of ‘group-think’ that doesn’t tolerate difference or shades of opinion. I’m not having a good day.

When I catch up with my Aboriginal colleague outside the theatre and suggest we have lunch, he tells me he’s busy. Another time.

*

After lunch I attend a third Break Out Session on ‘ “Independence” Within An “Industry” ’ (double inverted commas intentional). It’s hosted by a thoughtful and generous independent artist from Melbourne who opens with a confession of his own financial and career compromises over the last year. The room is crammed with indies (whoever we are) young and old, and he encourages us all to break off into twos and threes and ‘confess’ our own stories of shame and stress. I’m sitting with two writers (one also a critic), and our confessions are all about money (mine is about asking for free tickets). Then he invites us all to call out practical offers and suggestions about how to share resources and lighten the load.

The session is both encouraging and strangely deflating. By the end, I feel like I’ve been at an encounter group or AA meeting. I look around the room and wonder what if anything we all have in common, what if anything ‘independent’ or ‘industry’ mean in this context and whether they’re even helpful terms. We all seem pretty dependent to me: on each other, on significant others, on audiences, venues, funding bodies and other organisations, big and small. And is ‘industry’ the right word for a sphere of activity that’s clearly not driven by profit, and people who do what they do out of passion (or compulsion) rather than for money? Perhaps co-dependency and collective neurosis would be more appropriate diagnostic terms.

More specifically, what’s the difference between being an ‘independent’ and simply being a freelance artist (like most jobbing actors or freelance writers for example)? The fact that as ‘independent artists’ we’re self-employed, or initiate and make our own work? Perhaps (as an arts accountant in the room suggests) we’re a socio-economic category, like entrepreneurs or small-business-people. But what’s the difference then between being ‘independent’ and simply being an artist? And is it a badge of pride or a label for a ghetto? I’m not sure.

It occurs to me in this regard that jobbing actors and freelance writers are generally more squeamish than self-proclaimed indies about calling themselves ‘artists’. Perhaps they’re just less pretentious, or more realistic. Or perhaps they’ve just settled for a different badge, a different ghetto, a different group identity. Once again I’m struck by how few of them (especially jobbing actors) are here. A sense of powerlessness, voicelessness, scepticism or even futility about the very idea, meaning or purpose of having an Australian Theatre Forum? Perhaps they just can’t afford to be here. Most of the jobbing actors I know are either working – or working in some other job. I wonder how many would apply for a place or qualify as an ‘independent’ delegate. Once again the class structure of the industry rears its head.

*

Picking up on this theme, the day ends with a Plenary Session entitled ‘Smashing the Silos’. It’s back in the larger Everest Theatre, and I guess it’s described as ‘plenary’ because it’s intended for everyone: major and small-to-medium organisations, independents, freelancers (though once again I don’t see many freelance actors, technicians or stage crew here). The title refers to ‘collaborations between big and small companies and independent artists’: the ‘silos’ in question presumably being the funding and resources of the major organisations. These have been sheltered from massive cuts to the Australia Council by the current federal government, which have mostly impacted on small-to-medium and project-based companies. The facilitator is an executive producer with a small-to-medium organisation, and the panel consists of two independent artists who’ve done co-productions with larger funded companies, a producer with a major organisation, and the artistic director of another major organisation that started small.

I’m dreading another Q&A, but in the event it’s a refreshingly honest kiss-and-tell. The facilitator is very much part of the conversation and successfully mediates between the panellists; the discussion progresses; and I sense a genuine desire on the part of organisations and artists to make compromises and share power and resources. During question-time, a colleague from Daily Review calls on the major organisations to show solidarity with small-to-medium and project-based companies in the face of funding cuts that disadvantage the latter while leaving the former untouched, and the artistic director on the panel is disarmingly outspoken in his attack on the government. An independent company artist stands up and asks for access to programming and the artistic director tells him to ‘come and see him’. The producer of the other major organisation addresses the thorny question of hosting independent seasons without paying the artists; she acknowledges that it’s a transitional step, and she hopes they’ll be paying them in another five years. So do I.

All in all, I feel that this session is the most productive I’ve attended so far, and I leave the Forum at the end of the day feeling a little more sanguine about being an ‘independent’ and perhaps even part of an ‘industry’.

*

That night I have dinner with an old friend at a restaurant behind the Wharf Theatre on Walsh Bay. Luna Park grins at us across the Harbour and we reminisce about being part of a theatremaking collective back in the 80s. He reminds me of my ‘bloodymindedness’ and I burst out laughing. Some things don’t change.

After dinner we cross Hickson Rd and see another Festival show: French master-clown-mime-designer-director-theatremaking genius James Thierry’s Tabac Rouge at the Sydney Theatre. I saw Raoul – his last touring show to visit Australia – at the Perth Festival two years ago and was blown away. Tabac Rouge has been talked down by some people, perhaps because of its lack of overt narrative; but I find it even more thrilling than Raoul, and more profound. The physical and visual storytelling is clear to me: Thierry himself embodies an isolated Prospero-like figure surrounded by servants and offspring who are also fragments of himself. It’s about power and letting go, and I’m weeping by the end. This is theatre that doesn’t need to prove itself by speaking its message out loud or presenting identification papers. It’s justified by its artistry, has its own truth-content and makes its own rules. In other words: it’s art.

Friday 23 January

My final day at ATF. I miss the morning’s Opening Keynote Address (again) and attend a ‘Writing Room’ session (the third and last one) on ‘Writing Time’. The room is full of playwrights: it’s an oddly intense, introverted atmosphere. The facilitator is from a playwriting organisation, and the panel consists of a dramaturg and three writers. I enjoy the focus on craft, but have the feeling no-one really knows what they’re talking about, or how to talk about it – they just know how to do it (or not, as the case may be). I enjoy hearing about plays I haven’t seen or read though (past, present or to come) and imagining them in the flesh. I have a strong sense of the transience of the artform, and the amnesia that afflicts us as a culture.

The next session I go to is even more focussed on craft, and remembering things: the final ‘Respect Your Elders’ session is a conversation with Peter Wilson, puppet-guru and erstwhile artistic director of Handspan, the company that virtually invented visual theatre in Australia in the 80s. Seeing some of his productions back then – especially Secrets and Cho-Cho-San – transformed my sense of what puppetry and visual storytelling could be. He’s a wise, witty, vulnerable and generous conversationalist, and I’m enchanted all over again, as I was by the work all those years ago. It’s good to be reminded of the path others have walked – and in a sense the path that’s led us here. It helps me to understand where we are – and perhaps what’s missing.

The 70s and 80s in Australia were a time when grassroots social and cultural revolution from below was fostered by political revolution from above, and artists rode the wave. In the 90s and 00s, that process stagnated: movements and groups become institutions; a new professional cultural class took charge; and a new cultural divide separated administrators from artists, and perhaps artists from audiences. More recently there’s been another generational shift, but unlike the previous one, the structures of power remain unchanged. The new revolution, it seems to me, must proceed undercover, as it were, micrologically, in the gaps and interstices. I had some inkling of that in the session on ‘Smashing the Silos’ – perhaps not so much smashing the silos, though, as burrowing beneath them, or inserting oneself through the cracks.

 *

After lunch, we’re all transported on buses to the Opera House for a final Keynote Address by Flemish festival director Frie Leysen: ‘About Embracing the Elusive: Or, The Necessity of the Superfluous.’ It’s a feisty manifesto for autonomous art, and a timely intervention at the end of a Forum which I feel has dealt too much in terms of content and too little in terms of form; too much in terms of ‘the industry’ and too little in terms of the artform itself. I’m encouraged by her provocation that ‘art, culture and entertainment’ are ‘completely different’; and that art shouldn’t be asked to solve the problems of society or politics. She champions artists rather than single works; and arts organisations, venues, festivals, funding bodies, markets and even audiences are firmly put in their place – that is, defined in relation to art and artists, rather than the other way around. The pleasure-principle of consumerism and the reality-principle of commercialisation are both attacked in the name of disturbance, difficulty, imagination and intuition.

Afterwards, a motion of no-confidence in the Federal Government is passed around. I’m sympathetic, but I can’t help feeling that it’s a feeble gesture which completely misses the point of her speech.

*

That night I reunite with my Sydney friend who met me on the opening night of the Forum, and another friend and colleague from Perth who’s moving to Sydney, and we head out on the train to my final Sydney Festival show, Bankstown: Live. It’s a community event by Urban Theatre Projects occupying a residential avenue in Bankstown. Under a brooding Sydney sky, there’s a welcome to country by an Aboriginal elder, a Philippines-inspired spirit-house street procession, and an outdoor ballroom dancing event by couples from the local Vietnamese and other communities, followed by a program of formally and culturally diverse works and performances staged in front and back yards.

My friends and I stay for a storytelling theatre piece, The Tribe, based on a novel about growing up in a Lebanese-Australian family. It’s beautifully performed in a backyard by a Palestinian-Australian actor and friend who trained in Perth, and accompanied by a cellist, gusts of wind and flocks of parrots in the impressive eucalypts that stand sentinel over the old delapidated timber house.

The work, like the whole event, is slightly sentimental; but I feel that I’m participating in a genuine community theatre project, which has its own standards and indeed constitutes its own artform. In this sense, it’s every bit as autonomous as puppetry or contemporary dance.

We eat street-food at interval and then decide to head home. I’m weary, and my flight leaves early tomorrow morning. On the train back, I realise I’ll miss my friends, and the vibrant, teeming, multicultural metropolis of Sydney. But I also miss my community back home: my partner, my kids, my own suburban street, and my theatre colleagues and friends back in that remote city across the continent, on the edge of a different ocean.

*

Humph attended the Australian Theatre Forum in Sydney with the support of the WA Department of Culture and the Arts. His next Postcard from Perth Fringe World will be posted later this week.

Postcard from Perth 40

Fringe World Week 2: Absolutely, La Soirée, Sex Idiot, Fake It Till You Make It, Stag/Fag, Yoshi’s Castle, The Worst of Scottie

It’s been another big week out and about at Fringe World. The Perth weather’s been uncharacteristically steamy and even stormy, with lightning strikes and bushfires south of the city, but none of this seems to have seriously impacted on Fringe bookings, which are at capacity for many shows.

Last weekend kicked off for me on Friday night with three shows: none of them part of the handpicked Blue Room/PICA Summer Nights season or in conventional theatre spaces. In fact two of them were in circus tents and/or circus-related in content. As such they were more representative of the bulk of the Fringe, which is broadly comedy/cabaret/burlesque rather than theatre narrowly speaking, and as such appeals to a broader audience looking for entertainment rather than (but not excluding) art.

Absolutely is a one-man storytelling show by local actor Alan Girod. Last week it was playing upstairs at new live-gig bar-venue Jimmy’s Den in the throbbing heart of James St; this week it’s out at Midland Workshops. Despite the context and format (performer onstage with mic, audience on the floor on chairs or bar-stools grouped around tables) it’s more narratively crafted and emotionally varied than stand-up comedy, although it certainly delivered plenty of laughs the night I was there. Alan’s a very endearing (and very tall) performer with big blue eyes, a winning smile and an air of holy innocence. It’s the tale of a six-foot-nine-inch boy growing up in suburban Perth, finding his way through school and adolescence, discovering theatre while teaching in the wheatbelt, falling in love, hitting the wall professionally, taking the plunge to make his own work and go on tour, and finally landing a gig as a clown-giant with Cirque de Soleil. It’s a big story (no pun intended) but Alan delivers it with a light touch and effortlessly engages the audience regardless of their social or professional background. The underlying message (follow your heart) is an easy sell; if anything I wanted a little more of the difficulty, darkness and dramatic conflict which I’m certain is lurking beneath Alan’s sunny surface; but he’s a hugely gifted storyteller and it’s a unique story.

*

After Absolutely I wended my way up James St through the gathering Friday night crowds to the Pleasure Gardens and Palais des Glaces Spiegeltent for La Soirée. As anyone who’s ever had the good fortune of entering a Spiegeltent knows, they’re magnificent venues decorated with mirrors, wood panelling and stained glass, and conjure up a vanished Victorian vaudeville world. They’re also surprisingly intimate and effective venues for small-scale spectacular live performance, and the outside world quickly vanishes once you’re inside. In short: it was the perfect setting for La Soiree, a crowd-pleasing, jaw-dropping, sizzlingly sexy and transgressive circus based in the UK but featuring acts from around the world which has been doing the international rounds for some years now, including every other capital city except Perth.

Initially I was a little resistant as I always have been to the blandishments of the form and its inherently cajoling nature. However I was soon swayed and swept along – not simply by the prodigous physical skills and attributes of the performers, but by the sophistication and wit of their stage personae and the underlying celebration of diversity and indeed polymorphous perversity that took a very mainstream Perth audience along for the ride. The biggest crowd pleaser was probably the solo aerial act featuring a young topless German man in tight jeans and a bathtub full of water. My own personal favourites were the stripease act involving a disappearing (and reappearing) hanky; the manically hypersexual juggling clown (whose tools of trade progressed to a lethal combo of wig, dress, heels and knives drawn straight from De Palma’s Dressed To Kill); and a masochisic limb-dislocating Swedish contortionist and acrobat who had my companion (a dancer) covering her face and begging me to tell her when it was over.

*

After this extravaganza we made our way back down an increasingly alcohol-soaked James St to the pop-up Circus Theatre in the Cultural Centre opposite Perth Station. London-based performance artist Bryony Kimmings has two shows at Fringe World: Sex Idiot and Fake It Till You Make It (which I saw a few nights later at PICA). Sex Idiot is a one-woman odyssey based on a diagnosis of chlamydia which inspired Bryony to get in touch with all the men she’d slept with over the years and then put together a show based on the experience. Fake It is jointly created and performed by Bryony and her partner Tim, an account manager at an advertising firm who suffers from clinically diagnosed depression; the show is about his illness and their relationship. All this might sound dreary but Kimmings presents her material using song-and-dance routines, stand-up comedy, impro, audience participation, dressing-up, masks, physical and object theatre, games and activities, using a messy DIY aesthetic that’s reminiscent of English pantomime and kid’s TV (think Playschool for the physically, emotionally, socially or politically handicapped).

I have to admit I found both shows hard to take even if their intentions were admirable (and many in the audience were clearly captivated). To make a critical confession: there’s something about the aesthetics, politics and perhaps even ethics of ‘confessional theatre’ that I struggle with (though see my review of The Worst of Scottee below for a counter-example that won me over). As with the theatre of identity politics discussed and reviewed in my previous Postcard from Sydney (in particular Force Majeure’s dance work for fat people, Nothing to Lose), for me there’s something reductive about the ‘treatment’ (so to speak) of STD’s, depression or obesity purely in terms of social stigma and its overcoming. While important in itself this approach doesn’t address underlying causes and reduces individual people to being ‘cases’ defined solely in terms of their group identity. This reductiveness is reinforced by an aesthetic that presents itself as cool or ‘ironic’ but is actually the opposite, since it remains caught in what feels like a state of unresolved anger that can’t find any outlet except by being ‘acted out’. In fact Bryony asserts in Fake It that she’s inspired to make work by ‘feeling angry about something’. The question is: what exactly is she angry about, and why? The fact that people get sick, or the way they are treated, or both, or neither? I wasn’t quite sure. The work poses as being politically active, but its aims don’t seem clear – except perhaps simply to ‘talk about things’. However, as with ‘consciousness-raising’ campaigns like ABC’s recent ‘Mental Health Week’, I’m not convinced that simply ‘talking about things’ is necessarily helpful in itself – in fact it can even be self-reinforcing. In short: changing things isn’t just about ‘consciousness’. That’s why there’s a role for therapy and politics (neither of which is just about talking or acting out) if we really want things to change. Conversely (and this is controversial) perhaps art isn’t about changing things at all – at least, not in ‘the real world’ – except in the imagination (and the reality of our artistic practice).

To be sure, many in the audience clearly loved both shows. Personally I found Fake It more satisfying, perhaps because it was about a relationship between two people onstage, and ultimately a love story. There’s a heart-rending sequence when Tim plays the guitar and sings about one of his ‘under the duvet days’ while Briony holds the microphone and watches him with tears streaming down her face, which I won’t easily forget because was irreducably personal and real: a glimpse of what confessional theatre can be when it cuts through the pretence of both conventional drama and pantomime.

*

Also at PICA on Tuesday night before Fake It Till You Make It I saw Fag/Stag, one of five works in this year’s Fringe World by prolific Perth indie company The Last Great Hunt. Fag/Stag is co-written, co-directed and co-performed by Chris Isaacs and Jeffrey Jay Fowler, two multi-skilled and multi-platform artists whose work ethic and artistic personalities are typical of Perth as a place where there’s plenty of space to be filled, literally and creatively. In terms of content Fag/Stag is also distinctively about Perth: in particular about being young men (gay or straight) and best mates in a small town where everyone is two degrees of separation from everyone else.

The interweaving dual-monologue form reminded me of the work of Brian Friel (particularly Molly Sweeney) in its forensic capacity to provide contrasting perspectives and generate drama without necessarily involving direct action onstage. In a sense like Chris’s previous play for Fringe World and Black Swan State Theatre Company Flood (reviewed at length in a Postcard last year) Fag/Stag is a kind of testimonial or even proto-courtroom drama in which things continually threaten to spill over into the confession of an actual crime. Fag/Stag is in my view much more successful than the former play because it sticks firmly to a microscopic focus on lived experience, almost imperceptibly shifting into a fictional register without losing its grounding in authenticity. Chris’s background in improvisation gives his writing and performance a wonderful lack of affectation; and this serves as an effective foil for Jeffrey’s slightly more constructed and cutting persona (there’s even a touch of Alan Rickman about him) which in turn opens up to reveal a touchingly vulnerability I hadn’t seen before in his work as a writer or performer.

I found Fag/Stag easily the most slick and polished show I’ve seen so far at Fringe (with the exception of La Soirée, which is hardly qualifies as a ‘fringe’ show given its resources and pedigree). Beneath its deceptively simple and affable surface, it’s also a work of real depth, complexity and glimpses of hidden darkness. Performances and writing are artfully casual yet carefully calculated to keep things bubbling along and then deliver a narrative or character-driven punch when it counts. In particular, there’s an underlying exploration of low self-esteem on the part of both characters, gay and straight, which perhaps binds them just as surely as their evident mutual love and compassion. If anything, I felt the script skirted around one or two holes and perhaps avoided some of its own implications (for example the marks of self-harm one of the friends unexpectedly glimpses on his mate’s back but never asks him about) and was perhaps one draft short of completion; but I found the writing itself superb, and the performances beyond reproach in terms of timing, judgement and walking that fine line between artifice and truth. If I were in the habit of giving out Fringe Awards, this would be my first candidate.

*

The following night I met up with my daughter and saw my second Last Great Hunt fringe entry, Yoshi’s Castle, written and devised by Gita Bezard and performed by Arielle Gray and Adriane Daff at pop-up venue The Stables in the Cultural Centre. It’s too simple to say that Yoshi is the girl-power counterpart to the boy’s-own-adventure of Fag/Stag; but I’ll say it anyway. Arielle and Adriane play Tilly and Yoshi, half-sisters meeting for the first time after their father’s death to sort out the spoils. Tilly is a nurse, neat, precise, pendantic, responsible, and into historical fiction, costume drama, Jane Austen and Henry VIII’s wives; Yoshi creates video games, her own reality and identity, is into Japanese pop culture and lives in Tokyo. Interestingly they both appear to be single, fixated on their father and his legacy; unlike the wives of Henry VIII, the girls' mothers barely rate a mention. ‘Sisterhood’ here is both literal and political: it’s a culture war between notions of femininity as much as a psychological one between two siblings.

In fact the narrative framework of Yoshi feels as culturally constructed as a video game itself; and this effect is heightened by the bright and breezy playing style and staging, which features cartoon-like costumes, synchronised dance routines, a synthesized score and a lively screen-backdrop filled with digitally animated projections in hyper-saturated colours. In fact it struck me while watching Yoshi that for the first time this Fringe I was watching ‘a play’: that is to say, something capable of multiple if not infinite alternative stage-interpretations (I found myself imagining a less illustrative design and performance-style), but essentially consisting of dialogue between characters in conflict engaged in psychological transactions and sorting stuff out; and like so many plays in the history of theatre, essentially about the dynamics of families.

It’s a neat script and production, and the performances sparkle, but I couldn’t help feeling that something was being evaded in the relentless use of the pop-culture aesthetic. It’s as if the sense that we’re all ‘in the know’ somehow precludes us from experiencing anything directly – or indeed anything new. Then again, perhaps I’m just an old-fashioned, Jane Austen kind of guy.

*

After Yoshi’s Castle we went back up James St (quieter on a Wednesday night) to Perth’s iconic gay and lesbian nightclub Connections to see The Worst of Scottee, a performance work by the eponymous London-based queer artist, writer, DJ and party legend, created in collaboration with UK director and writer Chris Goode. In fact my daughter had seen Scottee himself in club mode a few nights earlier hosting the all-night Horsemeat Disco here at Connie’s, where she said he cut an intimidating figure. Tonight he was just the opposite: generous, vulnerable and even fragile as he bared his soul.

The Worst of Scottie is confessional theatre at its best. In fact a sense of ritual confession is evoked and parodied by the set: a photo-booth inside which the performer sits in profile, sometimes visible and sometimes curtained, while talking, singing, doing stuff and manipulating his appearance for the camera; meanwhile an image of his face looks out at us from a screen on the outside wall of the booth. Catholic rite, psychoanalytic session, video-blog – all are simultaneously evoked in this ambiguous libidinal apparatus and mechanism of surveillance.

Essentially it’s a monologue about growing up on a London housing estate, compulsive lying, compulsive eating, coming out, having a breakdown and – in a final gruelling act of anamnesis  – being arrested and accused of a sex crime at thirteen years of age. The sophistication of the design, however, and the use of clowning, disguise, persona and camp all take the show into a meta-theatrical realm that harks back to Genet, Wilde, Shakespeare’s gender-comedies and the Bacchae of Euripides; and the staging at Connie’s only added another layer of real-life and stage-irony. The overall effect was by turns hilarious, unsettling, beautiful and devastating.

Afterwards my daughter and I both had an aperol spritz at the bar and talked about the revival of homophobia in the age of mass-media saturation about paedophilia. This was theatre that didn’t just talk about things, or act them out, but staged them.

*

Humph’s Postcards from Perth Fringe World continue next week. His final Postcard from the Australian Theatre Forum in Sydney will be posted on Tuesday.

Postcard from Sydney 2

Australian Theatre Forum 2015 (Day 2) and Force Majeure, Nothing to Lose: Diversity and Difference

ATF Diary: Wednesday 21 Jan (cont’d)

For the third session of the morning I head upstairs to the foyer of the Everest Theatre for a ‘Respect Your Elders’ panel conversation about ‘Remembering Playworks’. I’ve always been interested in Playworks, which was an important national women’s playwriting organisation with a strong contemporary performance edge that ran out of Sydney from the 80s through to the early 00s.

There are 11 ‘nostalgia’ sessions like this one programmed throughout ATF. Later in the week a friend comments that too many events (including some of the Keynote Addresses) have spent too much time looking back at the past, but I reckon what Foucault called ‘the history of the present’ is critically important, especially in an evanescent artform and an amnesiac national culture. This is the case above all when we’re dealing with minority communities, cultures and artforms like women, children, Aboriginal people, regional and community theatre, children’s theatre and puppetry (I’m using ‘minority’ here in terms of power and status, not necessarily numbers).

The audience for this particular event is however relatively small, and mostly female. I also can’t help noting that it’s been relegated to the foyer rather than inside one of the theatres, and that there’s continual background noise from hordes of children who are being taken to a kid’s show in one of the main theatres downstairs. In short: it feels very much like we’ve been put in a typical ‘woman’s place’.

That said, it’s probably the most informative and thought-provoking session I’ve attended so far. A panel of speakers who were involved in running Playworks throughout its history reflect on the organisation’s achievements, challenges and vicissitudes, especially navigating the political and cultural changes (in theatre and feminism) that occurred during the 90s. Once again I’m struck by the tension between artistic freedom and the politics of identity – and within the latter, between collective and individual rights. This tension is marked by a historical and theoretical shift from the more ‘separatist’ feminism of an organisation that was intended exclusively for women to a more inclusive one that also served playwrights from other marginalised groups (e.g. working-class writers in Newcastle) regardless of their gender, and the debates about the identity of the organisation itself that ensued. Alongside this I sense a parallel tension between a more concrete, practical and prosaic definition of ‘women writers’ and a more abstract, theoretical and poetic notion of ‘women’s writing’ (the former perhaps more in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon feminism, the latter more influenced by French feminist theory of the 70s).

An elder playwright in the audience stands up and says she benefited from Playworks back in the early days, but didn’t have time to follow through professionally once she became a mother. She wishes the organisation still existed to support her now that her children have grown up and left home, and she has time to write again.

It strikes me that this story is emblematic of the particular disadvantages women face collectively (as differentiated from other minority groups). Once again it also reflects a historical shift from more collective to more individual notions of politics and theatremaking from the 70s through to the 90s and beyond. Despite progress in terms of language and consciousness, this shift has allowed structural inequities to continue beneath the surface. If you see yourself purely as an individual rather than as a member of a group, you’re less likely to recognise yourself as subject to these inequities, or to do something about it.

A colleague observes that playwrights feel particularly victimised by this shift because (unlike actors or directors) they’re often introverts, used to working alone and dependent on others to put on their plays for them or advocate on their behalf. Of course, this doesn’t apply to writers who are used to collaborating with directors and ensembles and having a voice in the rehearsal room.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink these notions again (of the individual and the collective), along with the division of labour between the sexes and the balance for both between work and family life. As the era of neoliberalism (on the right and left) begins to show signs of coming to an end, it’s a good opportunity for all of us (women and men, playwrights and others) to look back to the lessons of the previous era before plunging on into the unknown.

*

After lunch, I head back downstairs to the Reginald Theatre for ‘Pathways to Diversity’. The panel includes one artistic director (white, middle-class, male, gay), two young culturally diverse independent artists (at last!) and the Artistic Director of the Australian Theatre for the Deaf (white, female, deaf).

The testimony of the independent artists is especially refreshing. Unlike the others, their tone is upbeat, streetwise and unguarded. For example one of them gives short shrift to a suggestion from the audience that ‘positive discrimination’ is the way forward. I sense a more flexible, inclusive and post-colonial notion of identity here. Diversity emerges as something real, existing and potentially desirable for everyone. Conversely, the artistic director ties himself in knots trying to be an advocate for diversity, while acknowledging this needs to be a ‘personal’ rather than merely a theoretical commitment, but struggling to articulate what this means for him.

Meanwhile the deaf panellist (communicating in sign via an interpreter) is more sceptical about the blanket term ‘diversity’ itself. In the case of disabled people (as with geographically and economically disadvantaged communities) the burning issue is a practical one of access and participation, whereas for multicultural and queer artists the more specifically aesthetic question of representation seems to be paramount.

I’m reminded of the issue of childcare for women playwrights that was briefly raised in the Playworks session. Plainly, diversity is not a harmonious rainbow but a differentiated and non-synchronous site of potentially conflicting and conflicted interests and desires.

Someone from the audience protests that there’s been no discussion or representation of sexuality by the panel. Someone else points out that there’s been no mention of class either (as distinct from culture, gender, sexuality or disability). I silently reflect on the fact that both categories are generally absent (or rather unspoken) as terms of debate during the forum (though the artistic director on the panel responds to the protest by declaring his own sexuality). The language of class in particular has largely disappeared from public discourse, despite valiant recent efforts from the likes of writers like Tim Winton and Christos Tsolkas. Again, this reflects a historical shift in post-war (and more particularly post-Cold-War) politics and culture, at least in the developed world. However, things may be undergoing a tidal shift in the wake of the global financial collapse and more recent political developments in Greece and elsewhere. Expect to hear a lot more about ‘class’ in the coming decade, and perhaps even at the next ATF.

The fact is that working class people by definition have even less of a voice than other disadvantaged groups because lack of education, income or other means of access to positions of power defines class inequality. To put it another way: as soon as these deficiences are remedied, you cease to be a member of the working class; whereas if you identify as disabled, gay, female, Aboriginal or from another cultural background, that remains the case whatever these signifiers mean for you. That’s why the issue of class continually slips through the net of identity politics.

*

Following afternoon tea I wander back up to the Everest theatre for a plenary discussion called ‘What’s the Risk?’. The panel features a festival director, a freelance director, a literary manager and an indigenous ‘engagement co-ordinator’ and is facilitated by the general manager of a major organisation.

As with the opening keynote session in the same venue on ‘Art and Democracy’, the topic is vague and undefined, the discussion drifts, the panel fails to gel, the panellists have little in common and appear to be making it up as they go along. After a few minutes, I’m bored, and leave. There’s no ‘risk’ onstage here.

Once again I wonder if there’s something about the TV chat-show panel format that lends itself to idle chatter, especially framed by the architecture of a large proscenium arch theatre. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d enjoy watching theatre here either. The intimacy of the Reginald downstairs is a little more focussed; but in general the whole Centre strikes me as suffering from the typical flaws of most purpose-built multi-functional arts ‘centres’. It’s no wonder theatre companies and audiences shun them.

*

I hobble down the road to Carriageworks in Redfern to have an early dinner before seeing a Sydney Festival show: Nothing to Lose. It’s a new dance theatre work by outgoing artistic director Kate Champion for the company she founded, Force Majeure.

There’s a Sydney Festival artwork in the cavernous industrial-chique foyer of the venue: contemporary Chinese artist Zhang Huan’s Sydney Buddha. Two gigantic Buddhas face off: one entirely constructed of incense ash, the other an aluminum mold (from which the former is cast). The ash Buddha is slowly disintegrating: he’s already lost a hand, and some of the folds of his robe. The aluminium head of the mold lies on the floor beside it.

I find the work sad and strangely vacuous, at least in this context. It seems displaced, decapitated, desecrated, emptied of spiritual meaning, and eroded of any critical or political edge.

The boutique café at the venue is closed, so I head back down the road to the nearest pub for a $10 steak and a schooner. The ambience is refreshingly working class and free of ATF delegates. Then I head back to Carriageworks to meet a couple of friends and see the show.

*

I find Nothing To Lose a striking but ultimately confused and confusing work. Created by Champion in collaboration with artist, performer and ‘fat activist’ Kelli Jean Drinkwater, it hovers between contemporary dance and community theatre but doesn’t wholly satisfy me in either capacity.

It opens with an arresting image: the bodies of seven ‘fat’ performers reclining motionless onstage, piled up or leaning against each other in apparently easy intimacy. I find the image strangely confronting, beautiful and even erotic. It’s also stunning lit by Geoff Cobham. I’m vaguely reminded of the languorous beach photos of Max Dupain or Tucker’s disturbing painting of sunbathers as geometric chunks of flesh.

I feel disappointed though as the show continues. There’s no further physical contact between the performers, although at one point audience-members are invited to come onstage and prod them as if they were inert objets d’art. Otherwise the show consists of a series of unison dance routines and solos which I find surprisingly uninteresting choreographically except as demonstrations of what ‘fat’ bodies can and can’t do. Voiceover and spoken text intervene and further reduce image and movement to illustrations of ‘fatness’ as a social issue, stripped of its problematic and ambiguous carnality.

In short: community theatre prevails; nothing wrong with that; but even in this capacity, I can’t help feeling that the performers are ironically disempowered by being deprived of names, characters or stories (real or imagined) beyond being ‘fat’ – and presented en masse rather than as individuals whose physical difference would need no commentary in a dance theatre or contemporary performance work by the likes of Castelluci or Ballets C de la B. Here lumped together and collectively labelled ‘fat’ they become little more than identical objects or signs of wonder, pity or amusement. There’s also a lack of differentiation that troubles me between some who are simply large of frame and others who look as if they are struggling with health issues.

It occurs to me that Western dance as a form suffers from its own body-image disorder. This in turn reflects broader psychological, social and cultural issues affecting physical and mental health in Western society, including poverty and affluence, addiction, advertising and hyper-consumption. In this respect, anorexia and morbid obesity are two sides of the same coin, onstage or off. None of this is explored in the show, which remains preoccupied with issues of discrimination and ‘fat rights’; but I can’t help wondering if these preoccupations aren’t circular and ultimately self-defeating when framed exclusively in terms of identity politics.

I hasten to add that a ‘big’ theatre colleague sitting beside me in the audience feels very differently about the show; for her, it’s a much more positive and empowering experience. The same is true for a friend who unexpectedly appears onstage as one of twelve ‘extra’ performers in the closing unison war-dance. It’s a great community theatre finale, and the audience responds with similarly uniform enthusiasm. How can we not give them a standing ovation?

Afterwards I catch up with my unexpected friend, who’s not normally a performer (and isn’t particularly large either). She moved to Sydney from Perth a few years ago, and it seems like she’s finding her place here now, personally and professionally (she’s working in arts administration as a programming assistant at the Opera House). She walks me back through the park to Glebe Point Rd, and we part ways.  

I catch the bus back to my guesthouse, and ponder the complexities of identity and diversity. Art, artforms, politics, places, cultures, communities: all spheres that interlock but I still feel need to be differentiated between each other and within themselves.

*

Humph’s third and final Postcard from Sydney on the Australian Theatre Forum and the Sydney Festival will be posted next week. His second Postcard on Perth Fringe World will be posted this Friday.

Postcard from Perth 39

Postcard from Perth Fringe World: Week 1

It’s that time of year again in Perth. The Urban Orchard and Pleasure Garden outdoor bars are buzzing at either end of James St, the Spiegel and other circus and cabaret tents are sparkling, and regular and pop-up indoor venues are humming around the Cultural Centre and all over town. I’m seeing about twenty shows this year – local, interstate and international – and for the first time I’ve broken my own rule and asked for complimentary tickets, so I’m going to have to be super-efficient, see and review all of them one way or another, and keep the Postcards coming over the next few weeks.

Fresh (or not so fresh) back from the Australian Theatre Forum in Sydney (I’ll keep the Postcards coming on that event too), on Sunday night I caught two surreal New Zealand one-man shows in the hand-picked Blue Room Summer Nights season: The Bookbinder by Trick of the Light Theatre, written and performed by Ralph McCubbin Howell, and directed and designed by Hannah Smith, and physical theatre/mime artist/clown Trygve Wakenshaw’s Kraken.

The Bookbinder is an enchanting, witty and haunting work of visual storytelling theatre for adults and kids. The performance I saw was in fact haunted by quite a few very young, energetic and voluble sprites whose parents had presumably seized on the opportunity to keep them occupied on a sultry summer Sunday evening the night before Australia Day. Ralph coped manfully with the extra challenge, and kept us all enthralled.

The text is a Babushka doll of stories nested within in at least four layers of narrative, fantasy, dream and performance, reminiscent of the 1001 Nights (or more recently Neil Gaiman). Ralph’s storytelling protagonist adapts his voice and physicality to play mutliple roles while maintaining a beguiling intimacy with the audience and operating (or seeming to) lighting and sound cues; but the central performance thread is his manipulation and animation of the set and objects. Indeed the star of the show is a picture-book (beautifully designed and made by Smith) which contains hidden and multi-dimensional surprises. The Bookbinder is a small gem of a work that like all good fantasy manages to be artful and entertaining, light and dark, to speak across generations and indeed across time.

My second treat for the evening was Kraken, across the way at PICA. Trygve is also remounting last year’s Fringe hit Squidboy (reviewed in one of last summer’s Postcards) at PICA this week. God knows how he manages it, as both shows are virtuosic feats – Kraken in particular in terms of its demands on his body and imagination. It’s basically an extended improvisation – parts of which are doubtless premeditated and rehearsed but much of which is spontaneously elaborated ‘in the moment’, prompted by audience interaction and the performer’s impulses. The result is a stream-of-consciousness physical ‘monologue’ in which the body rather than language takes the lead. In a nutshell, it’s mime: but talking and thinking aloud also feature heavily along with numerous other transgressions – including plenty of scatology, sex, violence and even auto-cannibalism. I found it totally exhilarating, occasionally horrifying and continually hilarious.

Trygve trained with legendary French alternative clowning maestro Philippe Gaulier and embodies the latter’s ethos of play, complicity and amorality – all of which make the performance feel thrillingly risky and unrepeatable. Trygve’s ambiguous clown persona is hypersensitive yet cruel, hyperintelligent yet foolish, physically adept yet hopelessly clumsy, human and non-human, omnivorous and pansexual: in other words, ‘the poor bare forked thing’ Lear calls ‘unaccommodated man’. He’s also an incredible physical performer. I’m an unabashed fan.

On Tuesday it was time for some local content: a remount of longstanding local indie outfit Weeping Spoon’s Trampoline followed by new kids on indie block The Cutting Room Floor’s I Can Breathe Underwater. Trampoline is written and performed by the very talented Shane Adamczak, who plays an avatar of his familiar dopey geeky lovelorn harlequin persona, who in this instance has a hyperactive form of waking REM which causes him to continually hallucinate. He’s joined in this production by Ella Hetherington – doubling as his therapist and (literally?) the girl of his dreams – and Brendan Ewing, who continually threatens to steal the show in multiple roles as a series of real or imagined obstacles or ‘magic helpers’ on our hero’s quest.

I thought the performers suffered slightly from an unfriendly pop-up venue that did them no favours – and perhaps also from the evident lack of a director or outside eye. Nevertheless it’s a charming show, and Shane is a poignant clown, especially when he slings the guitar strap over his shoulder and circles his beloved in a serenade-duet while she (impressively) sings and bounces on the show’s eponymous trampoline.

I Can Breathe Underwater is a new show by an emerging company who’ve achieved a phenomenal output over the past year locally and on tour. Some of their most talked-about shows have been in found locations and site-specific venues like private houses and cafés, and I felt that I Can Breathe didn’t quite…well, breathe in the confines of The Blue Room Studio. It’s a touching exploration of anomie, suicide and grieving among a group of twenty-somethings, but in the context of a (relatively) more conventional theatre space, script and staging felt messy, dialogue clichéd and performances strident: perhaps holding the mirror up to nature, but making it difficult for me at least to feel compassion for characters so self-absorbed they seemed incapable of compassion themselves.

The most effective performances for me were voiceless: Jacinta Larcombe as a wild dancing seducer, observer and life-and-death spirit; and DJ Louis Frere Harvey providing live sound at the edge of the stage. Meanwhile the most effective exchanges of dialogue for me took place as ‘live’ but disembodied digital dating-app ‘chats’ projected on the back wall. Somehow these artificial ‘devices’ spoke more eloquently to me than the more naturalistically staged ‘scenes’ of the chronic disconnection between and within characters lost in a sea of social dysfunction.

On Wednesday night I went down to Cottesloe Beach, headphones and mp3 player in hand, for my own private immersive experience of Everything Unknown by UK company non zero one. Basically, you stand on the shore, follow a few simple instructions and listen to a voice and soundscape that’s been recorded on the other side of the world in winter on a beach in Kent. The conceit is that you’re listening to them in real time, and are thus somehow ‘connected’ – which of course you’re not.

These and other potentially interesting phenomenological complications remained largely unexplored in what I felt was a disappointingly banal text, delivery and use of technology, all of which failed to ‘augment’ an otherwise beautiful evening on the beach at sunset. Others may feel differently, but for me the message fell far short of the medium – and both fell far short of the lived experience of actually being there. I had a nice time at the beach though.

Last but not least, tonight (Thursday) I’ve just got home from two shows at The Blue Room. The Dirty Cowboy is a new production by Tim Solly and Steamworks Arts, directed by Sally Richardson and written and performed by Solly with set and costume design by India Mehta and lighting by Joe Lui. Basically it’s a Gothic country-and-western song-cycle linked by short stretches of monologue. Solly plays a hard-drinking ‘black sheriff’ in ‘a town called Suicide’, whose story of fatal love and loss gradually emerges much like the protagonists of Schubert’s song-cycles Schöne Müllerin or Die Winterreise – or perhaps closer to home the protagonists of ballads by Tom Waits or Nick Cave.

It’s a great idea, Solly has a fabulous Johnny Cash/Tex Perkins growl, and set and lighting conspire to recreate the ambience of the Cohen Brothers classic noir-Western Blood Simple. Musically I have to admit I’m not a big fan of country, or the maudlin self-pity that comes with the territory – and despite his gifts as an actor and singer, I found Solly’s performance a bit one-note in terms of pace, volume and emotional dynamics. In contrast, Waits, Cave, the Cohens and even Schubert all know how to mix things up a little and keep us on our toes. Nevertheless it’s a very stylish evening.

This was followed by Melbourne-based low-fi alternative-storytelling clown Stuart Bowden’s new show Stuart Bowden: Before Us. Like Trygve Wakenshaw’s Kraken, this a less narrative-based, more improvisatory, even dilatory work than its precursor She Was Probably Not a Robot, which like Squidboy was one of my highlights in last year’s Fringe World. Unlike Trygve, however, Stuart has a uniquely vulnerable, melancholic stage persona that reaches out and connects with the audience less through performative prowess than a kind of anti-performative pathos which makes us laugh while filling us with pity and even a sense of cosmic compassion.

Here he delivers a meandering monologue by the last survivor of an unknown and fantastic species that embraces and manipulates the audience to the point where, incredibly, we all ended up lying on the floor and singing after he’d made his final exit. Comic, tragic and musical artistry (he plays a series of electronic keyboards, sings in a quavering but pitch-perfect David Byrne tenor and is a deft foot with a delay-pedal) have never looked so artless, and the hand-made sleeping bag costume is to die for. In fact, death and extinction lie at the deepest layer of the text (which by the way is a superb piece of writing while seeming to tumble out without forethought or consequence). This is a form of theatre as sui generis as the novel-form Laurence Sterne invented with Tristram Shandy – and a show not just to be seen but experienced.

*

The Bookbinder, I Can Breathe Underwater, Dirty Cowboy and Stuart Bowden finish on 31^st January

Kraken finishes on 1^st February

Everything Unknown runs till 21^st February

More Fringe World reviews next week.