NOSTALGIA FOR REALITY Adelaide Town Hall Until 18 Mar 2012 Review by Aaron MacDonald Q: If one train leaves from Moscow carrying a terrible, terrible script and another leaves from Adelaide carrying five actors, two puppets and a projector, at what point do they slam together in a horrible fireball, killing the entire audience? Let’s accentuate the positive. Five astonishingly beautiful and obviously talented performers, direct from Russia, in the hallowed halls of the Adelaide Town Hall (well, a pleasantly air-conditioned conference room, at least) present the world premiere of a new show. The new show is “Nostalgia for Reality”. It’s… interesting. “Nostalgia” could be staged as a parody of every wanky avant-garde piece of theatre ever produced if it wasn’t obviously meant to be a serious work of art. Its self-indulgence puts Robert Mugabe to shame; the script draws upon sources as venerable as the Bible and Saint-Exupéry without any kind of real context and delivered with a hollow gravitas. Some of the interpretive dance, to be fair, is excellent: complex, acrobatic and impressive, and the quartet-quintet-septet flow as a single entity. There are also a few good laughs to be had early in the production. But these few high points do not redeem the show. To give the simplest metaphor for the show: imagine you visit a modern art gallery. There is a work – a blank canvas with a few drops of paint, perhaps, or a tower made of fluorescent light tubes – which has no apparent meaning in itself. It is meaningless, in fact, without the large placard which accompanies it, explaining the work (in several thousand words). It might perhaps be art, but it is not entertainment. Rating 1.5 stars (out of 5)