These two twenty-two year old Melbournian comedians are not your well-known Ross Noble or Frank Woodley (yet). Nor do they try to be. They don’t pretend to be anything other than two twenty-something comedians, performing for the love of it in a small Adelaide pub. They casually mingle with the audience before the show (whilst constantly reminding us that their mingling is not part of the show, and that the show has not started yet, therefore please wait five more minutes until the show begins and then feel free to judge us) before scurrying behind the curtain to start their performance for real. Attwood and Culliver met at uni and started working together a couple of years ago on a project for Channel 31, before performing at the Melbourne Fringe last year, and again in Melbourne and Adelaide this year.

The Cuckoo Bar on Hindley Street was a small space, and filled with people I think it would have created a good atmosphere for the show. However, on the night I attended, there were only seven people in the audience. This meant the comedians had to do more work to keep the audience engaged and they had to create the atmosphere themselves, which they both managed without difficulty, and they didn’t let their small audience affect the energy in their performances. I asked Attwood if he found it difficult performing for a small audience, and he explained that ‘it’s only hard until you start talking to them. But then you get onstage and you see everyone laughing, and you don’t care.’ Culliver added that ‘three people sitting in the audience enjoying the show, for us, is much better than thirty people sitting there not laughing.’ This shows that for these two comedians, it really is about getting up on stage, having a good time and making people laugh.

On this particular night, Max Attwood, or, as he introduces himself, the man who resembles a Lego-box man with his haircut, got the honour of performing his set first. Attwood took a little while to warm up, but once he did and once he got into the rhythm of his anecdotal jokes, his theatrics lifted and he found his pace. Adelaide jokes were guaranteed to crop up, although I was pleased to discover that when they did, both Attwood and Culliver managed to steer clear of the clichéd “back-water” jokes that are too far worn to be funny anymore and create their own, original Adelaide mockery. It is an expectation that comedians mock Adelaide when they perform here, and I would have been disappointed if they’d decided to leave out Adelaide jokes altogether.

Paul Culliver, or, as he refers to himself, a man who decided to grow a beard so he didn’t look like a twelve-year old (only to look with a 12-year old with a beard), seemed much more sure of himself on stage than his partner, and began his set with a quirky little improvised dance. While strange, I thought it was a great way to separate the two sets and introduce the audience to Culliver’s performance. Culliver was much more theatrical than Attwood and seemed more at ease with the small audience. From start to finish he blasted through his set, occasionally interacting with Max backstage, destroying any illusion that this show is anything but a couple of mates performing for a few friends. For me, it was this casual, laidback attitude that really made the show. They embraced the format and the nature of their small show and made it work for them, rather than against them.

I would have been interested to see more interaction between Attwood and Culliver, rather than having two distinctly separate sets, yet even so both comedians performed with different styles which allowed the audience to view them as two individual comedians as opposed to a duo. Don’t let a seven-person preview night audience put you off going to the show. This stand-up performance blatantly refuses to take itself seriously, and that is what really struck me about the show. Come and join us, Attwood and Culliver seem to say, let me spend half an hour showing you what the world looks like to me. It’s definitely a funnier existence through their eyes.

There is no time for the audience to orientate themselves, or ease themselves into this play- the lights fade, the stage illuminates and it begins, hardly pausing until the end. Ladies in Waiting is a play presented by Adelaide-based company Early Worx In Theatre & Art. The company was founded in late 2010, specifically to create more opportunities for emerging Adelaide performing artists. The play, directed by Charles Sanders, explores the experiences of different women in different situations and different times in different countries in the world, and stars three emerging Adelaide actresses, Hannah Bennett, Elizabeth Hay and Amy Victoria Brooks. Sanders explained that the concept came about in an unusual way. ‘I wanted to work with these three girls. We wanted to create a piece about women and for women, and we went hunting for scripts.’ The play is pieced together from several different, shorter pieces, and each actress has multiple roles to play, engaging with the audience in different ways through their characters’ monologues. The pieces are all very separate from each other as the women tell their individual stories, yet they are also all interconnected.

The basement theatre at Higher Ground, Light Square, provided a small, intimate space which was integral to the overall feel of the play. The set design and lighting were both very basic, which allowed the freedom to enact several different situations and scenarios onstage. Sanders deliberately chose not to use any music in the piece, as he did not want to manipulate the audience members into feeling a particular emotion. He wanted the raw environment to contrast with these women revealing their stories onstage, allowing the words to speak for themselves. This technique worked extremely well. While there were some lighter characters in the piece, for example, Amy Victoria Brooks’ portrayal of a young woman leaving New York to live in Berlin, and Elizabeth Hay’s young university student who is sleeping with a married man twenty years older than her, these were juxtaposed with darker characters, in particular, Elizabeth Hay playing a woman wearing a burka. This character returns throughout the play, sharing with the audience the horrible things she’s encountered in her lifetime. It puts the plights and worries of some of the other women into perspective.

All three actresses gave strong performances, although the stand-out for me was Amy Victoria Brooks. She slipped effortlessly from a Scottish accent, to a New York accent, to her Australian accent. The monologue her Australian character shares with the audience is so subtlety moving, and I believed every word her character said. All traces of the previous characters played by the actresses were completely gone by the time they reached their next. For most actors, knowing one character inside out to be convincing in a play is hard enough; yet these three actresses made playing several different roles in one play seem easy.

Even though most of the time the play allowed the audience to think through the themes and messages for themselves, at times it felt very didactic. I asked Sanders about this, and he explained that ‘the words of the woman in the burka are real words, every word spoken under the burka are real words of a woman who lives in New York. It’s not a theatrical experience with three actors; it’s about you and me having a chat. It’s a conversation with the audience.’ The very nature of monologues is that they are, or can be, conversations with the audience. After hearing the thoughts of these women so intimately, and being allowed insight into their lives, I found it jarring for the play to suddenly jump to more direct statements to the audience. These moments were very short in the scheme of the whole play, but even that was enough to take away from the stories of the different characters. Simply leaving it as jumping from a bumbling Western woman concerned about trivial things, to the woman with the burka and her actual hardships would have worked fine by itself. Still, I understand that Sanders was working within the constraints of staying true to what this woman actually said.

Ladies in Waiting is a play which will hook you from the start and not let go. It is definitely worth seeing. The play allows the audience to witness for themselves and experience the lives of all these very different women, while showcasing some of Adelaide’s young talent.

Pressure is inescapable. Navigating through fields of pressure is something life demands, no matter what age a person is.

PressureLands is a play written and directed by Alysha Herrmann, and is part of the Youth Engagement Program at the Adelaide Fringe. The concept was born in 2009 in the Riverlands, where Alysha spoke to and interviewed more than 600 young people between the ages of 14 and 26, asking what pressure meant to them. This developed into a drama workshop which young people living in the Riverlands took part in, and finally evolved into the Adelaide Fringe Show PressureLands. There are two things to keep in mind when watching the performance: one, it was created mainly to perform in schools, and two, this is amateur theatre. The actors are students from the Riverlands. Eighteen-year old actor Milly Hoffmann explains that the workshopping process ‘was really important, because it is to showcase the Riverlands. If we want to go to uni, we have to leave the nest. We can’t live at home, whereas people [from Adelaide] live at home [while studying].’ Several students need to take a gap year in order to be able to afford to move to Adelaide to study. The show really tries to create a dialogue with the audience, engaging them in the different kinds of pressures facing students living a country life, some of which are not relevant to city kids.

There is much creative interaction with the audience throughout the piece. As the audience enters and finds their chairs, each seat has a clipboard with a test, asking questions such as ‘What are you most afraid of?’, as well as an envelope. One of the actors, Brianna Obst, walks around with a folded paper chatterbox, asking various audience members if they’d like to play. Then, the lights dim and Milly Hoffmann and James Herrmann join their fellow actor onstage. “Play” is a loose term to describe the performance, because although there is a story thread running through the piece, it is constantly interrupted by direct communication with the audience, or little asides, or side tangents to the central storyline, as the three actors try to make the audience understand what it’s like living with all this pressure.

The music accompanying the piece emphasized and intensified as the pressure the students suffered strengthened. The acting was overall pretty good, particularly the onstage interactions. Even so, it was the segments which were understated and represented, rather than outright said, which were the most effective. There was one scene where the three actors repeatedly mime out their daily routines onstage, which slowly picks up speed until it reaches a frenzy in time to the music. That scene was so powerful because it demonstrated that no matter what kind of pressure a person is feeling, it manifests itself in similar ways, and is something most people can relate to.

About halfway through the show, the audience were asked to participate in an exercise that was given to a class of Year 12 students at the beginning of their final year of high school. We had to draw how we thought others perceived us on the outside of the envelope and write five different words to describe ourselves on the five pieces of paper inside the envelope. This is where the show has clearly been developed for schools, yet to me it is an important piece not only for students, but for their parents. How can parents be expected to understand the pressures their kids face when they grew up in a different generation? And how can parents offer support to their kids if they don’t at least try to understand?

The play extends to not just the many different scenarios and pressures the three actors portray, but really tries to allow everyone who took part in the project to have their voice heard. The back wall of the set was papered with letters from students, beginning “Dear PressureLands”. After the show, director Herrmann invited us to read for ourselves the pressures these students deal with every day, from school to parents and peer groups, and how those pressures affect the choices these young people make. One line from the play has stuck with me and refuses to go away. In response to her parents’ criticism of her decision not to go to university, the character replies, ‘My life wouldn’t be wasted, it would be mine.’ Enough said.

PressureLands is the voice of hundreds of Riverland students, releasing their burdens out into the open to share with others, and it is so important that those students have the chance to express themselves. It is, however, more than a play of expression: it really strives to make the audience understand why these young people feel so much pressure.

For more information on the project, please visit http://pressurelands.wordpress.com/

Imagine losing yourself to a sphere where only you exist. Nothing is what it seems and you’re locked away, with no way back, not through friends or family, and definitely not through yourself. Quiet Little Fox’s production Awake, directed and written by Fleur Kilpatrick, explores lives which have been tainted and poisoned by two different diseases. Quiet Little Fox is an independent Melbourne theatre company and this is their third consecutive year performing at the Adelaide Fringe. The performance is split into two short plays, the first entitled ‘Wonderland’ and the second ‘Sandman’. Original songs act as an introduction and conclusion to the pieces, as well as an interlude between each play.

The Queen’s Theatre is, in theory, an ideal location, with high tin ceilings and an informal audience setting with chairs and tables, yet as the venue is divided into three separate theatres, loud music from the theatre next door constantly infiltrated and interrupted our performance. It is perhaps for this reason that ‘Wonderland’ didn’t resonate with me as strongly as it could have. Jean (Justin Batchelor), is a man who can’t remember and his wife, (Kristina Benton), tries to pretend things are okay, but she struggles to hide her frustration as she constantly repeats and retells old stories and memories to her husband, who isn’t sure who he is, let alone anything else. The music from next door’s theatre was particularly loud at the climax to the piece, and I can imagine how frustrated the actors must have been at the disruption, but they hid it well. Despite this, the piece conveyed that there is something liberating about the old man’s disease. He views each day afresh, with no baggage, and everything is a wonderful discovery.

‘Sandman’ was a much stronger piece, telling the story of Ester (Joanne Sutton), a young mother with a genetic disease, fatal familial insomnia. Her son Sam (Alex Roe), and brother Nate (Justin Batchelor) are her only support systems as her condition rapidly deteriorates. This piece broke down the fourth wall and addressed the audience directly in parts and allowed them into the piece more so than ‘Wonderland’. It felt as though we were being invited in to witness this family’s fight, and Joanne Sutton was especially engaging in her role, demanding the audience’s attention.  The piece kept jumping between internal monologues and dialogue, which enabled the audience to see different perspectives of each character. The effect paid off and I felt a much deeper connection to those characters than to the characters in ‘Wonderland’. It wasn’t that the characters or the cast in the ‘Wonderland’ piece were not well-developed or acted, but the story felt much more familiar than that of the second piece, perhaps because the sorrow of Alzheimer’s disease is so well documented. Therefore, I had an indication of what to expect.

There was a lot going on in the performance, with the content, the songs and music which accompanied each short play. This seemed a stark contrast to the sparse set, which consisted predominately of a couple of wooden chairs and gave the impression that the audience was about to experience a raw, slice-of-life production. Awake definitely delivered those things, yet it was overshadowed by the other elements. I felt as though the subject matter of each piece was heavy enough and involved enough to carry the performance without the songs or additional music, which detracted from the actors onstage. There was no time for the audience to consider what they were seeing. Again, the music from the theatre next door possibly offset the intended effect of the music in Awake.

There was potential for Awake to really delve deep into the minds of the audience and demand that they question and reflect upon the cosequences of its characters’ debilitating illnesses, yet the songs and the music and the constant distraction of next door’s music got in the way. Still, the show is an interesting exploration of family and strength and about what happens when there’s almost nothing left.

In a tucked away street west of the city lies The Wheatsheaf Hotel. Out the back in a comfy tin shed, Zephyr Quartet and Jo Kerlogue invite you into a new, different world. It’s a little like stepping off a plane into a foreign country: completely unknown and utterly captivating.

microMACRO brings together music and art in an entwined performance. Zephyr Quartet are a string quartet who formed in Adelaide in 1999, consisting of members Belinda Gehlert (violin), Emily Tulloch (violin), Lillian-Terri Dahlenburg (viola) and Hilary Kleinig (cello). They play a set of original compositions while performance artist Jo Kerlogue draws in time to the music. The whole stage is her canvas, as well as paper which criss-crosses in paths along the floor and even up onto the walls and tables, allowing the art, music and audience to interact with each other. From the start, it is clear to see that the venue is as much a part of the show as the music and art. The Wheatsheaf Hotel offers a casual setting filled with a mishmash of tables and chairs for the audience, and Jo explained that choosing the right venue was extremely important. ‘We wanted somewhere that wasn’t a theatre as such,’ she said. ‘We wanted to take classical and contemporary music and visual art and put it in more contemporary spaces.’ They certainly achieved this by utilising the laidback feel of The Wheatsheaf.

The interaction between the music, art and audience plays a crucial role in allowing the audience to become deeply immersed in the created world. It is something which Emily Tulloch says took time to get right. ‘The show had a few incarnations. We started with different versions, one in 2009 and another last year. It’s been evolving. We started out using pre-composed music, and then a combination of pre-composed and some we’d written ourselves. At first, it was us simply playing onstage with Jo painting behind us.’ They’ve since found that the art and music go best together when they use music they’ve composed themselves, and they definitely got it right with microMACRO. Instead of separating the music from the artwork, the quartet move around the space with Jo, ensuring they are very much a part of the artwork, without intruding on the world in the art itself. At times, various members set down their instruments and interact directly with Jo, giving the piece a very playful feel and showing that neither could exist as they do without the other.  The interaction is so important to the overall atmosphere of the show and it really allows the audience to see the music and artwork as inherently part of each other.

While the structure of the show is the same each night, there are sections which are improvised within that structure. It is exhilarating watching a world thrive, prosper and falter all within fifty minutes, and Jo’s energy is endless as she prances around her canvas, adding and taking from the world she has created. Zephyr Quartet’s composition is beautifully arranged, really enhancing the highs and lows of the story within the artwork, yet they aren’t afraid to stop playing and allow the scratching of charcoal on paper to speak for itself.

My one qualm with the performance is that once I was enticed into the world, I didn’t want to be pulled out, and The Wheatsheaf Hotel happens to lie beneath a flight path. The sound of the airplanes interrupted my immersion, but even so, it didn’t take me long to slip back in.

microMACRO will pull you in and hold you there until they decide to let you go, and offers something for the young and old alike. It is well worth a visit into this artistic feast and, if you get there early, make sure to sit at the table covered with white paper. You’ll get an up-close and personal experience.