Rahat Saini and Jessica Heafey in Carmen Alatorre’s costumes on Lachlin Johnston’s set
(Photo by Tina Krueger Kalic)
I hated this show so much that thinking about writing this review gave me a stomach ache. I don’t want to be cruel but, if I’m not frank, I’m not doing my job.
I first encountered playwright Bronwyn Carradine’s Unexpecting in early 2021 when it was an audio play produced by the Arts Club. Back then, I wrote that the script “skips along at a snappy sitcom pace”, but complained that “the piling on of obstacles often feels arbitrary and insubstantial.” Having gone through a couple of workshops since then — presumably with Zee Zee Theatre, the company producing this fully staged version — the script is now massively worse. And it’s been very badly directed by Cameron Mackenzie.
Within that, there are a couple of strong performances and Lachlan Johnston’s set is exciting.
Let’s get into it.
My bet is that artists are more likely to get away with this kind of nonsense on the fringe circuit, where audiences are more predisposed to giving it a pass as “artsy”. But Ha Ha Da Vinci is just very badly made. Phina Pipia, who wrote and performs this piece, plays a grad student named Luca who happens upon the plans for a time machine invented by Leonardo Da Vinci and his collaborator, magician Luca Pacioli. As soon as present-day Luca opens the plan, she is transported to Renaissance Italy, where the voice of Da Vinci himself — heard over a radio — tells her that the time machine works for going back in time (that’s how Pacioli disappeared), but nobody knows how to make it move forward. I’m going to give away the big reveal: Luca figures out that music allows us to move forward through time, so she plays her tuba and off she goes. That’s it. That’s the end. At the performance I attended, the audience was clearly surprised the show was over. That’s because nothing had happened — at least nothing that makes any narrative or intuitive sense. Pipia dances uninteresting choreography at a proficient level, she plays her guitar and sings forgettable songs, she does one okay magic trick, and she plays the squares on her bedspread as if the bedspread were a musical instrument. (Think Big.) But nothing holds together. There’s no narrative to speak of, no sense of stakes or a meaningful struggle to overcome obstacles. There is no internal logic in Ha Ha Da Vinci and zero sense of accumulation. The idea of the lost Pacioli is raised but never addressed. Why is there a radio in Renaissance Italy? Writer/performer Pipia is showing off — and, charmingly, she seems to be having an excellent time — but there’s very little in it for the rest of us.
In Every Good Story Ends With One, well-loved Fringe performer Martin Dockery tells the story of a humiliatingly bad run he had at the Adelaide Fringe Festival, a run that was miraculously saved by an ardent — and anonymous — fan who sent a series of letters and small gifts to his dressing room. As a performer, Dockery knows what he’s doing. His delivery is so infectiously energetic that resisting it would feel ungenerous. Within this extremity, he uses sudden changes of tone and volume for dramatic — and comedic — effect. He knows how to repeat phrases to get laughs from accumulation: “Not that I’m religious!” And his storytelling is always appealingly affectionate, even when he’s mocking his own eagerness to believe that Erin, the faceless, phone-numberless writer, sees something in him that everybody else in his grumpy nightly audiences has overlooked. For me, Every Good Story goes thematically slack, though. Dockery explores the idea that narratives, including religious and romantic narratives, can be runaway generators of meaning and, all too often, repositories of pure fantasy. There’s nothing wrong with these ideas, but they aren’t fresh either. I kept thinking, “If you’re going to take me here, show me something new.” And then, after spending too long in the wilderness, he does. The final passage of Every Good Story is transcendentally trippy and packs an excellent narrative punch.
