A festival under restrictions

As the curtain came down on the final performance of the Adelaide Festival’s centrepiece attraction, Benjamin Britten’s opera of Shakespeare’s popular comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, American rising star countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen had mixed emotions of euphoria and relief. Nussbaum Cohen had spent much of last year in COVID-19 lockdown at home in San Francisco, and arrived in Australia in January and spent two weeks in hotel quarantine before starting five weeks of rehearsals for his lead role as Oberon, king of the fairies. Nussbaum Cohen was one of a handful of international artists to perform at the Adelaide Festival, which although it went ahead under COVID-19 restrictions on audience size and health controls, still boasted a program of 70 events including 10 world premieres and 14 Australian premieres.

While the Adelaide Festival finished on March 14, A Midsummer Night’s Dream had its final performance on March 3 at the 2000-seat Festival Theatre. “Knowing that we were among the only people in the entire world performing in front of an audience, the feeling was one of relief and joy,” Nussbaum Cohen told The AJN. “It was a special feeling knowing how lucky we all were, and to experience the excitement of being back in the theatre. I would have quarantined for 28 days instead of 14 days just to be here and do what we have just done – it has been extraordinary to get back to somewhat normal life.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream was directed by the festival’s co-artistic director, Neil Armfield, in its Australian premiere season of four performances, and saw Nussbaum Cohen hoisted high above the stage on a metal platform for much of the three-hour production.

“It was Neil’s innovation – I don’t know of any other opera where the lead performer flies above the stage,” said Nussbaum Cohen. “I’m not afraid of heights and don’t get motion sickness, but I was glad to be back on the ground for the final part of the opera.” Set in a mythical Athens, A Midsummer Night’s Dream sees one couple, Lysander (Andrew Goodwin) and Hermia (Sally-Anne Russell) run away to elope, while another couple, Demetrius (James Clayton) and Helena (Leanne Kenneally) follow them into the forest.

Meanwhile, the rulers of the fairy world, Oberon (Nussbaum Cohen) and Tytania (Rachelle Durkin) are having marital problems. Armfield dedicated the opera to Jewish director Elijah Moshinsky, who died in London in January.

“Elijah was one of the world’s finest opera directors, and his dazzling production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Australian Opera in 1978 remains one of my greatest experiences in an opera theatre,” Armfield wrote in the program notes. “Elijah remained a mentor and supporter of my own career as a director.”

Armfield also directed another of the festival’s centrepiece productions, A German Life, starring theatre royalty Robyn Nevin in its Australian premiere season at the Adelaide Festival Centre. Nevin plays Brunhilde Pomsel, a young typist who worked as a personal secretary to Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, from 1942-45.

After World War II ended, she was arrested and jailed for five years for her war crimes, and lived to the age of 106, passing away in a Munich nursing home in 2018. When Pomsel was 103, she was interviewed by an Austrian documentary film crew and the resultant film and transcripts led to British playwright Christopher Hampton’s 90-minute solo production.

Nevin, 78, has been performing on stage and screen for six decades and gives a powerful performance using a simple set consisting of Pomsel’s aged care room as she recounts her life story.

For Jewish audiences, some parts are harrowing to watch and raise questions of her complicity. Pomsel complains of short-term memory loss, but is able to remember certain events in vivid detail. She recalls her childhood Jewish friends, her father’s Jewish customers and her Jewish bosses at typist jobs, but hardly gives a thought about why they started disappearing as the Nazis assumed power in the 1930s.

This includes her Jewish school friend Eva Lowenthal, who Pomsel thought had been sent to a re-education camp. Only well after the war ended did she discover that Eva had been murdered at Auschwitz. Against a backdrop of confronting film clips of Hitler and Goebbels at mass rallies and the destruction at Kristallnacht, Pomsel denied knowing anything about Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust until 1950, when she was freed from prison.

The dark mood, augmented by occasional cello interludes by musician Catherine Finnis, is lightened by Nevin introducing a sense of humour into Pomsel’s monologue.

When Armfield offered Nevin the role in mid-2019, she knew that a solo show was very demanding. “I have not worked in the theatre for a few years as I have done more screen work, but when I read the script for A German Life I thought that it was worth doing,” Nevin told The AJN last month.

“At the time I read the script, it was also the context of the American political situation with Trump that screamed a warning and really persuaded me. It seemed the conditions that led to World War II were being replicated in America.” Nevin, who was the Sydney Theatre Company’s artistic director from 1999 to 2007, was recognised in last year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours with an AO for her service to the performing arts.

The Adelaide Festival played to reduced capacity in theatres with the audience wearing masks. While busking and street theatre in Rundle Mall was kept to a minimum by government COVID-19 restrictions, there was a festival mood as the Fringe Festival, the Gardens of Unearthly Delights festival, WOMADelaide and the Adelaide Writers Festival continued in reduced formats.

A four-day WOMADelaide kicked off in early March with a sunset concert featuring Lior and the 54-piece Adelaide Symphony conducted by Nigel Eastlake. Also on the bill were Archie Roach and Sarah Blasko, performing at King Rodney Park on an outdoor stage flanked by gum trees with the audience seated at a COVID-safe distance on the lawns and limited to 50 per cent capacity. Israeli-born Melbourne singer Lior sang the seven songs from the Compassion album – which won the 2014 ARIA for best classical album – starting with the Hebrew song Sim Shalom and ending with the High Holy Days hymn Avinu Malkeinu, plus other songs in Arabic and Hebrew. At the end of the 45-minute performance there was a treat for Lior’s fans as he sang several of his hits – backed by the orchestra – including Safety of Distance.

Adelaide Writers’ Week was held from February 27 to March 4, while the Adelaide Fringe and the Garden of Unearthly Delights festival opened on February 19 and run until March 21. Danny Gocs visited Adelaide courtesy of the Adelaide Festival.

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