A Company of Strangers
Strut & Fret Productions
11 March 200
The Garden of Unearthly Delights, Spiegeltent
It didn’t take long among the company of strangers (and an old friend) to be reminded of the things that Adelaide does well.
Adelaide’s not just 1950s attitudes with great beer; this city knows how to create mouth-watering salt and pepper eggplant, affogatos and Fringe festivals. The Adelaide Fringe is the biggest on this side the world, because it’s the best. Audiences flock to shows; they see anything and everything – not because they’re among the arty farty “in” crowd, but because they know that taking a punt on a Fringe show is likely to be a lot of fun. And if the show sucks, they will enjoy it anyway, because they’ve paid and there’s still beer drinking and hanging around with the cool folk to be done.
Strut & Fret productions have captured the essence of the Adelaide Fringe in the Garden of Unearthly delights. Teenagers, dressed for nightclubs, line up alongside their grandparents, dressed for a possibly chilly evening, to get into the Garden. The food is delicious, the coffee is great, the bar has plenty of overpriced beer, the craft stalls are worth a look and there are more theatre spaces than you can count on both hands. I love the Spiegeltent when it sits by the Melbourne Arts Centre, but the tent feels at home in the Adelaide parklands.
Melbourne-based and world-travelling Martin Martini MC’s the Garden’s showpiece: A Company of Strangers. He declares Adelaide his favourite place to play – and it doesn’t take long to figure out why. This crowd doesn’t care about deconstructing the artistic merit of the piece– they want to enjoy the wackiness. So this show of strange people performing amongst the company of strangers is the perfect show for this perfect festival.
The company is a collection of wonderfully-odd musical cabaret performers. There’s no theme and no cohesion -it’s just meant to be fun.
The most-loved of the permanent strangers is the UK’s Le Gateau Chocolat. He knows that larger folk can appear svelte in flowing layers of black – so he has a collection of glossy, coloured lyrca body suits. With an opera-trained voice he belts out soprano-favourites as a bass and even has a play with Rhianna’s about an umbrella – whilst looking like a cockless telly tubby on acid. Drag is no longer a drag.
Lady Carol strums a ukulele and professes to be a “’lady” from Ireland. Her husky voice encourages the crowd to sing along, but she needs to decide if she is herself or her character on the stage.
Our own Paul Capsis should never be off a cabaret stage. Resplendent in red velvet he channels Janis Joplin and even sobers the mood with a composition co-written with Tim Freedman about his Nanna’s migration to Australia.
For all of the Strangers’ wonderfulness, none shone quite as blindingly as their special guest: Meow Meow. Lost in her own glamorous time-warp, Meow wraps herself around the audience and demands their support – literally. After forcing the audience to undress her she is carried to the stage with her thighs wrapped around the neck of the best looking man she could find. (I wonder if Mr Gateau is thinking of doing the same one night…)
With a temper rivalled only by her ego, Meow answer a less than modest “I know” to her rapturous applause. She thinks it’s for her, but we know it’s for someone else. Creator and character are so distanced that it’s hard to imagine them as one. Meow is too selfish to ever let us glimpse the woman behind her. She also knows that an illusion fails if we see the sleight of hand, and Meow’s magic would fade if we could see the work, the skill and the understanding of form that creates this exquisite parody.
A Company of Strangers is ideal Fringe fare. There are different special guests throughout the season, but be assured the Strangers will make you feel like you’re one of them in no time.
This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com.
