The concept behind Worst Side Story may be one of the most elegant fringe show ideas you’ve ever heard. Its creators, Brandon Mannarino and Leigh Qurban, had never seen West Side Story and, for that reason, they adapted it. Their piece’s self-reflexivity and self-deprecation mean that it is not just a parody of the original. Rather, it is a playful parody of its creators and their process. This proves both entertaining and deeply rewarding.

If you’ve seen West Side Story you can probably predict what Worst Side Story might look like. If you haven’t then let it suffice to say that the latter piece is, partially, an exaggeration of generic love story tropes. However, this only describes one of the piece’s mimetic levels. Intercut with the vague reimagining of West Side Story is a fictionalised account of the creative process behind it. This self-reflexivity defines the piece.

While self-reflexivity is usually employed to reflect on a work’s artful process of creation, Mannarino and Qurban employ it here to reflect on their work’s artless process of creation. This is perhaps the most important method of deriving humour in the piece. Even the most juvenile jokes within the adaptation (or parody) of West Side Story become deeply entertaining in the context of the artists’ self-aware ignorance.

The theatrical and filmic realisation of the concept is, not dazzling, but perfectly fitting. The scenes that focus of the creation of Worst Side Story seem to be shot, on a camcorder, with little to no regard for cinematography. This lack of production values imbues the faux-documentary with more verisimilitude than can be seen anywhere else in the play. After all, this is the story of two hopeless artists. Likewise, the shoddy theatricality is very realistic.

Considering how crucial the flaws of the production are to its success, there is only one criticism that can be levelled at it: Worst Side Story could have gone further. Its concept is genius. Adapting not from West Side Story but some vague and indeterminate space laterally opposed to it should have provided the writers with a brilliant opportunity to create a text with some originality. No text exists in a vacuum, but Mannarino and Qurban managed to create their own little pocket-sized simulacrum of one. Instead of using this basis to its ultimate extent they settle into parody. Of course, it is a clever, self-deprecating form of parody, and is deeply entertaining, but there are so many places this concept could be taken.

That, however, is a minor theoretical issue that shouldn’t detract from the show as it is: self-deprecating, self-reflexive, and hilarious. Its season at the Adelaide Fringe may be over but it definitely merits seeing if it is reprised. Worst Side Story is crass, over-the-top and more than clever enough to make that work.

Worst Side Story has finished its run at the Adelaide Fringe, but they are hoping to stage it in Melbourne in the future.

Run Girl Run is a cleverly devised exploration of gender politics condensed into two treadmill cycles. Many contemporary theatre pieces share its concerns, but this show, presented by Grit Theatre, tackles them in a fashion so direct that it feels unique.

The lights go up on three treadmills, which three people soon fill.  What follows is an hour of running, drinking, and seemingly empty conversation. It’s like Waiting for Godot for a generation with gym memberships and low self-esteem. The characters are constantly running without moving forward. They are simultaneously exercising and drinking to excess. They talk with one another, but only to reach the narrowest possible consensus.

It does not have a traditional plot. Instead, it finds form in conversational motifs that perfectly assert the crippling, systematic imposition of this culture’s fixation on body image. The details of the conversation are often too stunted and mundane to be entertaining in their own right. However, that is not to say that the sum of the parts is anything short of insightful.  The conversation as a whole is ingeniously structured around the building speed of the treadmill. Manifestations of underlying self-doubt intensify to hysterical self-disgust as the pace of the machines increases.

Run Girl Run has been described as high energy, but really this physical energy only comes in bursts at the end of the treadmill cycle. It is easy to be impressed by the physical endurance of the actors (they do run continuously and drink a lot), but that is to ignore the point of the show. What the cast, comprised of Tom Browne, Laura Hughes and Clare Phillips, succeed in is less gimmicky than simply running for an hour. It is instead their keen timing and perfectly emphasised delivery of crucial conversation motifs that deserve praise.

Run Girl Run is an invigorating theatre piece, but not because of the physical endurance of the actors. It is instead how the show uses its central oxymoron: stationary motion, and how it uses emotionally stunted characters to reach powerful emotional climaxes.

Run Girl Run’s Adelaide season has ended, but you can get information about Grit Theatre’s upcoming productions here.

A sense of disorder is almost inevitable in a show about schizophrenia performed by twins. This one follows a character who is as grounded as possible, considering the earth beneath his feet is comprised of suitcases. Rendered despondent in his struggle with writer’s block, he meets his twin, whose temperament is the exact opposite of his. This untameable doppelgänger promises to help him write jokes, but instead leads him on a meandering and nonsensical adventure.

Somehow the puerile plot manages to climax rather poignantly. The realisation strikes that the loutish double is a figment of the other’s imagination. By that point their identities have become so lost that each is confused as to who should write the other out of existence. This, however, follows a complication that uses a three-day canoe ride across the ocean, and a portal through Narnia, as crucial plot devices. The majority of the piece seems to be a realisation of the illogical tales told by over-imaginative children. Deriving humour from nonsense can work, and does work here, to an extent. The plot, however, relies too heavily on some of the weaker lines of this humorous nonsense, which can become tiresome in their juvenility.

These non-sequiturs are excusable, but had the performances been stronger they could have been enjoyable. The players sporadically stuttered their lines and announced everything directly to the audience. The physical comedy was laden with stumbles that didn’t seem written in and many a hesitant glance. All this created a sense that the actors were under-rehearsed, and this soured the rest of the show. What could have been playful fun came to seem lazily written and carelessly performed.

Thankfully though, Conjoined is not just acted. One of the most entertaining elements of the show is its comedic variety. Sock puppetry, mime and stand-up all feature prominently. It is a bizarre new vaudeville. Although the nonsensical humour may not make for the best plot, it definitely does work in the form of sock theatre subplots and long stand-up routines about jazz drummers. It is during these sections that you benefit from relaxing into the piece and simply being able to laugh.

Conjoined may meander, but in the course of its meanderings it finds some moments of inventive humour. The under rehearsed delivery does detract from the show, but, with a bit of polish on the part of its actor/puppeteer/comedians, and a taste for jocular nonsense on the part of its audience, Conjoined could make for a very entertaining night at the Fringe.

Fifty minutes is all it takes for Insomnia Cat Came to Stay to draw you into a world where time cannot be measured: the world of the sleepless. However, despite the constant agony of the condition, you find yourself entertained, enthralled, and even grateful to be exposed to the mind of an insomniac in such a breath-taking and cerebral manner.

Insomnia Cat is not simply a play about insomnia, either stylistically or thematically. It is a powerful blend of poetry, performance, music and animation that offers insight into the restless human condition. It is a one-woman show, but it would not have been as poignant, or even possible, without the perfect contributions of its offstage team. Writer Fleur Kilpatrick has shaped her own experience with the condition into what is not merely a stream of consciousness, but a flood. Her words never deviate from the insomniac’s unattainable obsession with sleep, as it comes to encompass all of life. Whether they take the form of sardonic references to pop-culture, considerations of neuroscience, or fevered, hallucinatory reminiscences, the crazed thoughts build with moving rhythm to crescendos of screaming or song, before sudden silences.

It would take a stellar performer to do justice to all the poetry and pain of the piece, and Joanna Sutton is just that. She is haunting from the start. Draped all in white, bound to the stage by the sleepless sheets that are her prison, she embodies a very human struggle with the unattainable. Her spoken, sometimes shouted delivery is hilarious in places, and always deeply moving. Her singing is powerful (she is a graduate of the Elder School of Music’s classical singing program), but unashamed to break with the strain of her character’s suffering. However, perhaps the most powerful element of her performance is her physicality. She is tied to one spot on centre stage and has her character struggle against this binding with the ferocious intensity of the unjustly incarcerated. With only the use of her upper body and her voice, she gives a performance to rival a full ensemble.

Set designer Sarah Walker ensures that the Sutton must fight so as to avoid disappearing into the set in the same way that an insomniac must constantly fight to avoid disappearing into sleepless oblivion. It is a simple set – Sutton in white bound by a white sheet, before a white projector screen – but it is aesthetically pleasing and thematically crucial. The simplicity of the set also allows animator Thomas Russel to superimpose the insomniac’s visions onto the insomniac herself. His lo-fi animations are what truly make Insomnia Cat a brilliant multimedia show. The hallucinogenic visuals emphasise the words and actions of the insomniac. Like the set design, the animations are simple but work with the other elements of the piece in an intricate and powerful way.

The music is the final element of the intense multimedia piece that is Insomnia Cat. Sutton sings lyrics by such notables as Tom Waits and the Rolling Stones. Her vocals are backed by a soundtrack composed and arranged by Roderick Cairns and mixed by Steven J Hearne. These guitar-driven arrangements capture a similar desolation to that in the work of the Velvet Underground, albeit in a more polished way. In fact, the show as a whole is comparable to Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It is an assault of media on a cerebral level capturing the rapture of restless minds. In this sense, and in its own right, the soundtrack fits perfectly.

Director Danny Delahunty and his team can be extremely proud of the skilful combination of media that is Insomnia Cat. Every part works together to convey, ultimately, a beautiful chaos. Though credit must go to the team, it is still a one-woman show. Tuxedo Cat’s blue room is the perfect venue for it, the limited seating capacity adding to the intimacy already inherent in such a piece, and making Insomnia Cat Came to Stay a very personal, very intense experience.

Insomnia Cat Came to Stay is on every night at 9.45, until the 3rd of March, at the blue room – Tuxedo Cat.

The set is the first thing about Chloe Eckert’s Sage to strike you. Family portraits and pages torn from novels form a web of words, spun from the crucial cliff top. The story that ensues upon the entrance of the play’s tortured protagonist, and the words used to tell it, are just as powerful and poetic as those pages seem to promise.

The play has a core cast of just two, but, thanks to its concern with mental illness, these two actors embody an array of emotional states that are as compelling as they are conflicting. The play opens on Grace (Melissa Martins) as she stands alone on a cliff top in a state of panic. This is relieved, if only momentarily, by the entrance of Charlie (Nic Cutts). What follows is an exploration, by each of the characters, of each other and themselves. The plot is compelling, not simply because Grace could hurl herself from the cliff at any moment, but because the dynamic of her relationship with Charlie evolves in a manner that captures your attention, and then fosters a deep empathy. Most importantly, however, having captured her audience, Eckert knows how to use sudden turns of mood and haunting ambiguity to engage them.

It is easy to see why Eckert’s script won the Flinders University Young Playwrights Award. The dialogue darts between poetry and humour with intuitive rhythm. Though at a few points the script’s comedic side descends into cheap one-liners, the majority employs brilliant absurdist humour in a Beckett-esque fashion. However, it is the emotional and dramatic sequences that give the piece its power. These are reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, at times directly quoting her. Where many young writers would have abused the poems, Eckert blends such works as Mad Girl’s Love Song seamlessly into her own.

Sage is also Eckert’s first foray into directing. It is an admirable debut. Just as the interplay between the two core characters is crucial, so too is the interplay between Grace and the lighting and sound. The lighting perfectly matches Grace’s mental state. The cerebral, non-diegetic sound directly interacts with her, offering us a window into her tortured subconscious and allowing the audience to better understand the surreal horror of her mind. Eckert has ensured that every part of the production aids in the audience’s understanding of Grace and Charlie’s mental states. Even the three minor characters that comprise the rest of the ensemble exist purely as a humorous contrast to Grace’s mind.

But Sage is, at heart, a play about two, main characters, and of these two, Nic Cutts as Charlie is the stand-out. He takes advantage of everything the script offers. Enabling the play to draw laughs one moment and sombre attention the next. Though most of the crucial lines belong to Grace, Cutts gives the most haunting monologue of the night, perfectly embodying all the pain of his character. He ensures that the interplay within Charlie is just as powerful as his interplay with Grace.

For all its successes, what Sage’s publicity prides itself on is avoiding the clichés of tackling mental illness. Owing as much as it does to Plath and Beckett this was always going to be a challenge. However, Sage does manage it, and it is Grace’s backstory that makes this possible. She comes from ‘the perfect family’ and yet she is empty. No past trauma led her to the cliff, but there she is. Grace simply is the way she is. Her ‘white picket fence’ background is not merely refreshing, but makes her relatable to a large portion of the theatre-going audience. Her past is not one of melodrama. It is crucial in that it is mundane. In this respect, Sage fulfils its promise.

Sage is a piece that hangs constantly on the precipice. Yet this constant threat would not be as compelling without the play’s well-crafted writing and powerful performances. This, its first season, is particularly short. As fleeting as the lives it depicts. But these lives, and this play, are definitely worth experiencing.

Sage is on at 7.00pm tonight (22^nd of February) Century Theatre, Immanuel College, 32 Morphett Rd, Novar Gardens, as part of the Adelaide Fringe. (Running time 60 minutes)