Continental greats

There’s plenty of European theatre imports taking to the stage in Adelaide this year, covering everything from self-harm to totalitarianism, civil rights to sensory deprivation. Mark Fisher takes a closer look at some of the drama highlights heading south

Can you call it a festival without a visit from Ivo van Hove? That’s a moot point, but certainly all eyes will be on the return of the Belgian theatre director to the Adelaide Festival. Like Kings Of War, the Shakespeare mash-up he brought here in 2018, and Roman Tragedies a few years before that, A Little Life is a show that sets its own pace, the four-hour running time feeling as leisurely as the production is mesmerising.

The work of van Hove’s company Toneelgroep Amsterdam, the play is an adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s international bestseller and takes a similarly forensic deep-dive into the lives of a group of middle-class New York men who circulate around the self-destructive figure of Jude St Francis. Neither book nor production is for the faint-hearted.

Played here by Ramsey Nasr, heading an excellent cast, Jude has an appalling history as an abused child and a degraded adult, a trauma that manifests itself in self-harm. Van Hove does not spare us the blood.

For all the grimness, there is something compelling in the fluidity, friendship and everyday business of this show, most recently seen at the 2022 Edinburgh International Festival. Performed on an open-plan domestic interior to the accompaniment of a string quartet, it defies you to look away.

If you think Yanagihara’s novel exists in too hermetic a world, then your antidote is the Belarus Free Theatre. This remarkable company is made up of exiles from the tyrannous regime of President Alexander Lukashenko and its work is charged with the fury of lives unjustly disrupted. Dogs Of Europe is an adaptation of the banned novel by Alhierd Baсharevič and warns of the dangers of turning a blind eye to authoritarian rulers. The current war in Ukraine makes its vision of a Russian super-state seem only more urgent.

Directed by company founders Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, it is not a straightforward polemic, however, but what one critic called ‘a fever-dream of dark, surreal incident and discombobulating, detective-like quest’. It is at turns physical, dreamlike and disturbing.

European theatremakers also get a good showing at the Adelaide Fringe, among them Apphia Campbell with the Nina Simone tribute Black Is The Color Of My Voice. The American writer and performer, now resident in Scotland, not only situates Simone as a civil rights activist in an era of violent racism, but also, in this fictionalised drama, makes Simone’s music her own.

It is one of a healthy crop of post-Edinburgh Fringe productions; others to look out for include the one-woman heartbreak of Eva O’Connor’s Mustard, the spoken-word narratives of Casey Jay Andrews’ A Place That Belongs To Monsters, and the sensory deprivation of four shows under the banner of Darkfield staged in 40ft shipping containers with the lights turned off.

A Little Life, Adelaide Entertainment Centre, Hindmarsh Road, 3–8 March, 7pm; Dogs Of Europe, Adelaide Festival Centre, Festival Drive, 2–6 March, times vary; Black Is The Color Of My Voice, Tandanya National Aboriginal Cultural Institute, Grenfell Street, 27 February–5 March, times vary; Mustard, Holden Street Theatres, Holden Street, 14 February–19 March, times vary; A Place That Belongs To Monsters, Courtyard At Treasury 1860, King William Street, 2–12 March, times vary; Darkfield, The Garden Of Unearthly Delights, Rundle Park/Kadlitpina, 17 February–19 March, times vary.