The Short and Sweet Festival is in its seventeenth year World-wide and entering its tenth year here in Queensland exhibiting over 200 artists in theatre and cabaret. The biggest ten-minute play festival in the world enables unique and diverse independent performances to demonstrate their talents in theatre or cabaret competing to win one of twenty one awards. The unique twist is they only have 10 minutes to do it! In the time that it takes you to order a coffee or have a shower, the Short and Sweet performers will have tantalised and tickled your fancy for Queensland theatre with a cacophony of comedy, disturbing drama or overt outrageous bursts of ten-minute theatre and cabaret, as they present their unique performances with flair and exactitude.
Proposals, scripts and auditions are reviewed by anonymous industry judges to ensure only the best performances get through to the heats with wildcard places for those who deserve a chance. The finalists are nominated by the audience with each member choosing two of the ten featured performances eager for the opportunity to battle it out at the Gala Finals on the 1st September.
I attended Friday night’s Strand 4 night which was a mixed bag of solo and group theatre performances. Up first was the hilarious Greetings from Yeppoon, written and performed by Jeremy Gordon and directed by Row Blackshaw. Jez takes you on a journey through his life in the small country town of Yeppoon between 1994-2012. He used visual media whilst narrating live on stage of his tales of love, drama and woe in three sets, encouraging the audience to choose which story he would tell between three titles for each, such as Parkies vs Poonies vs Bendovers and the Arsehole of Yeppoon. It was a popular and hilarious performance incorporating audience interaction with slick frank dialogue, funny visual media to enhance his narration and blue Aussie humour.
Another popular solo performance was the unique Why Am I like this? Performed, written and directed by Peter Wood about a fashionista teen. Teddy is showing off his new pastel shiny jacket whilst worrying about how it and he is perceived by a judgmental society. The character see-sawed between outrageous gay flirtation to pitiful pathos, as he struggled with who he really is and whether he should just be himself. Each story was told whilst wearing a pair of Grandma’s sunglasses, transforming Teddy into a sizzling hot singing and dancing fashionista, rather than a plump and awkward teenager. It was both entertaining and hilarious as Teddy strutted his stuff whilst relating a tale where he mistakenly admitted at school that he was a Lesbian rather than a Muslim, causing no end of problems!
The last solo performance Plastica Fantastica by Art for Earthling and written and performed by Jennifer Anne Laycock, highlighted the tragedy of Nunny, a middle-class woman obsessed with plastic but with a severe allergy thwarting her dreams of becoming the Tupperware queen. It was a distinctly unique off-the wall performance with Nunny portrayed as a frightening obsessive psycho with no idea of how to present herself in society and was received by an ebullient audience.
Two fascinating group performances were Gentleman and The Table in the Park. Gentleman was written by Arthur Jolly, directed by Alex Budden and performed by Andrew Fraser, Joseph Mclaughlin, John Siggers and Raphael Tefera. It is set in the men’s toilet at the urinals and was an intriguing and amusing study of ‘men talk,’ if men had conversations whilst gathered together for a chat in toilets, like women do. It covered philosophy and psychology using comedy to outline male issues such as penis size and prostrate problems.
The Table in the Park, by the Adwah Haswah Theatre Company of Wonder and Magic was written and directed by Adam Hasa and performed by Adam Hasa and Jordan Schulte. It was a surreal insight into a night in the park where two drunken men stumble upon a table set up for a party, but abandoned. One was inexplicably dressed in a dinosaur onesie whilst the other sported braces and a fedora. There were some excellent, but bizarre scenes made more mysterious when they both ad-libbed as props went awry. A particularly captivating scene was when time was sped up. The men had collapsed around the table and days passed with their flinching movements accompanied by a light day and dark night cycle to give the impression of them sleeping day after day after day.
Some of the remaining performances were less enjoyable due to disturbing material, poor elocution and weaker scripts, but overall, the line-up was very impressive. It is incredible the volume of dialogue and material that can be crammed into only 10 minutes! The Short and Sweet Festival is an enthralling confluence of sizzling humour, Aussie wit, disturbing pathos and a cacophony of comedy with outlandish creativity from local Queensland artists.
20th-30th June, Gala Finals 1st Sept, 2018
Brisbane Powerhouse
Home of the Arts (HOTA) Gold Coast
By Dr Gemma Regan