Adelaide Reviews

The Adelaide Fringe Festival began life as performances on the ‘Fringe’ of the Adelaide Festival, but has for many years taken on a life of its own, and now claims to be the biggest arts festival in Australia. Its shows range from circus, through cabaret and various non-Classical genres of music, to very diverse forms of theatre, and often involve some kind of fusion of genres. Double Take, however, involved no fusion of genres, but was an example of absolutely classical mime. The two actors wore white painted faces with black lips, which has been the standard of mime ever since Marcel Marceau developed the genre out of the figure of Pierrot, the sad clown, at the beginning of last century. They used no props apart from two black cubes, and no voice at all.

This show, one of three by Broken Box Mime being performed at the Fringe festival, was essentially physical story-telling. Julia Cavagna and Kristin McCarthy Parker presented eight stories, mostly vignettes of contemporary life; some comic, some touching, and some salacious. Julia Cavagna played a woman throughout the stories, and Kristin McCarthy Parker played a man in most.
Among the comic sketches was a woman following a cooking video to prepare a meal for a friend. The video itself was acted by the man, a caricature of the complacent competence so often displayed on TV cooking shows, while the woman, following just slightly behind and getting everything wrong, burnt her fingers and dropped things. When her friend phoned to cancel, she paused the video in mid gesture.

Another comic sketch was Do you have it in my size, every retail assistant’s nightmare, in which the retail assistant chases round the streets to find the right shoe size for a customer, only to discover, when she finally returns with the right size, that the customer has changed their mind and wants a quite different shoe. And there was the hilarious pair of trombone players in Brass Section, one of whom was clearly less than a master of their instrument.

The sketch Please depicted a dominatrix in a brothel, and a customer who seemed distinctly ill at ease in the environment they found themselves. Their dressing and undressing was depicted completely convincingly without either of them actually removing any clothes.

The most touching piece was Recollect. Here we saw a couple, perhaps a mother and her son, recalling an episode from the son’s childhood when the mother taught the boy to skim stones. They are now much older, and the son is looking after his decrepit mother. The skill with which the mother transformed herself from young to old with the smallest adjustment to her face and posture was just one of the techniques which gave the whole show a quite remarkable virtuosity.

The final sketch, The Whole Shebang, was nothing less than the history of the world, from the Big Bang to the moon landing and the twin towers. (I confess that I had to have this explained to me by my companion, who is much more widely versed in physical theatre than I am.) The music for this was Beethoven’s Tempest piano sonata which, with its violent alternations of wildness with sudden silences, very much suited the theme.

Between some of the stories a snail appeared, moving snail-like along the arm of one of the actors, reminding me charmingly of tropes of repetition such as Leunig’s ducks, or Schroder’s piano. Each sketch was accompanied by music tracks, whose contours were faithfully reflected by the actors. The stagecraft of both actors was immaculate. The whole show was one in which technical wizardry was wholly at the service of delighting, provoking, or astonishing the audience. There was so much detail that I have decided to go to Double Take a second time. A double take of my own, in fact.