Grehan credits the style on Butoh theatre, an art form created in Japan after World War II. It’s a form that is is usually defined by slow, controlled physicality, white body paint, and abject imagery, that sought to turn away from Western traditions, so it feels jarring to say that a Western man can be a Butoh artist. Nonetheless, Grehan has traversed this delicate line bravely, and whether he succeeds or not would be up to a Butoh expert, not a theatre reviewer.

Grehan is clearly a trained actor, who has serious control over his body and physicality onstage. What lacks in the piece, then, is the narrative. Although we are told in the program that we’ll be lead through six stages, in the actual performance we are blatantly hit with these ideas; portraying “frustration” by angrily plastering paint onto one’s body is hardly a unique way of enacting this feeling in performance art.Though the performance wavers the most during the middle section, we are rewarded with our patience during “presence,” when audience members are invited to join in and paint Grehan’s body. The imagery of this moment is beautiful and raw, but is in fact the simplest, least embellished part of the presentation.

If you’re unfamiliar with what PACT usually showcases, you might find HIM to be confronting and confusing; it’s definitely not theatre as you know it to be. Though you can still enjoy HIM by embracing what the Fringe is all about — discovering new work you wouldn’t normally enjoy, and finding beauty in them when you normally would not.

Reviewed by Bridget Conway

Yet performance poetry has the uncanny ability to take away the beauty of the poems themselves, and with Cathy Bray’s Latitude Platitude, performed at the funky Glebe-style cafe, The Record Crate, poetry takes centre stage and performative show is left behind in the dust. We are left to ponder the words and not the staging. We are forced to listen and not to look. The poetry is what we’ve come to see, and it’s all we are given. This may be a difficult show for some people, when most audience members nowadays crave the fast-paced, polished and abrasive theatre vibe. (They want the show, and they want it now.) And while Bray’s performance lacks all this, it does make up for it in other ways. It is poetry, plain and simple.

Latitude Platitude crosses multiple poetry genres – haiku, rhyme, spoken word and narrative. It deals with the important and not-so-important issues. We wonder about politics, we hear about motherhood, and we laugh at religion. The show is littered with fantastic one-liners that make you giggle, such as “there are more than fifty shades of grey in my beaver alone,” and “there are only three poets in Australia making a living from poetry – Les Murray”. Cathy Bray, otherwise known as The Madwoman, is brash and honest about growing old and being a poet, and it’s refreshing to see that truthfulness and authenticity alive and well at the Fringe.

Latitude Platitude is all about poetry, meaning that there is not much of a show to see. It falls flat because of this. Bray reads from a script and moves from microphone to microphone so as to show that she is moving onto her next piece of poetry or to make an important point, yet this becomes difficult to follow. She would also benefit without the random table filled with wine glasses and books that sits at the back of the small stage, which becomes useful only twice during the show.

If this performance tried hard not to be a show, then we’d be even more blown away by Bray’s poetry. But this is The Fringe, and in order to get an audience, one must try their best to stand out like a sore thumb – but a beautiful and unique sore thumb at that. Bray does stand out, but only when she doesn’t try does she truly succeed.

Reviewed by Bridget Conway.

Found at Better Read Than Dead in Newtown, a tiny boutique bookshop located on the busy King Street strip. The show was sold out, and the chairs were squeezed together into two long lines facing a shelf of books and the show’s stage (a few lamps and a desk riddled with old books, binding materials, and a jug of water). The brochure, craftily designed to look like a page torn from a dusty old book, tells us that the show premiered at a tiny book shop nestled in Wellington for the New Zealand Fringe Festival and, as the season went on, had to increase their capacity “from fifteen to fire hazard”. The same seems to have happened for their Sydney debut, which made for a very intimate experience. The show benefited from this close-knit set up though; it’s all about storytelling and we all know storytelling happens in the most intimate places.

The Bookbinder is immediately engaging and pulls you straight into the story – the tale of a young apprentice bookbinder who “cuts corners” and fails to properly bind a book owned by an old, mysterious woman. He is then catapulted into a dreamy underworld of chaos and magic and told he must bind the “gap in the world” in order to pay penance to his failure to bind the old lady’s book properly. The only actor on stage is Trick of the Light Theatre’s co-founder Ralph McCubbin Howell, who begins the show by explaining that if we want to become a bookbinder, then we better hear his tale of a bookbinder’s apprentice. This brings us straight into the story, leaving no time for dawdling. The Bookbinder is quite a unique story, moving at a fast and engaging pace because of Howell’s comedic skill and excellent puppetry, and by the compelling narrative written by Howell himself, story by Howell and Hannah Smith, fellow Trick of the Light Theatre founder. His writing is equally as exquisite as his acting, and it truly feels like we are reading a book instead of watching a play. The program tells us that this is the intent, saying “we wanted to make something that was intimate and immediate, engaging and surprising – kind of like reading a book”. This sort of theatre, in our day and age, when everyone is reading electronic books as opposed to books printed on paper, is much needed. Especially for the younger generation, who may baulk at the sight of a hard copy book that one has to physically turn pages in order to enjoy.

The Bookbinder is a heart-warming and haunting piece of theatre. It was raw and scary, yet playful, using lighting tricks, puppetry, sound and the pressing intimacy that exists in most Fringe show venues with incredible skill.

If you missed The Bookbinder in Sydney, catch their next performance at the Melbourne Fringe Festival from September 19.