The Baby Farmer - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Ghoulish, grotesque, unsettling and suspenseful. These are some of the words used in my review of The Laudanum Project's 2014 Melbourne Fringe Festival show, The Grand Guignol Automaton. Thankfully, these masters of horror storytelling are back this year with The Baby Farmer. Admittedly when I first read the title of the show I thought it was going to be a cute comedy piece but when I saw who was behind it, I went to a very dark place very quickly.

"I have to say that it’s extremely heartening to hear that just seeing our name can do that to you. Happiness gained through other peoples' discomfort is what we do best I suppose," Nick Ravenswood, the show's writer tells me. "The Baby Farmer is best described as a dark Victorian fable that is set against the backdrop of London’s East End during the 1870’s. The story centres around six year old Agatha May and her mentally disturbed mother Winnifred Alcorn."

"Since fleeing to London to escape the horrors of her past, Winnifred has found work as a baby farmer and is currently caring for five newborn infants. The miserable drudgery of Agatha and Winnifred’s existence is turned upside down as an ever-growing nightmare of nocturnal premonitions and visitations befall them. As Agatha and Winnifred’s desperate world slowly begins to unravel a shadowy stranger appears on the streets of Whitechapel and initiates a terrifying game of cat and mouse that will leave both mother and daughter changed forever."

The Cocoon - Melbourne Fringe Festival preview

Love is a complicated thing that can pull you from one direction to another. Sometimes it can be freeing and liberating and at others you can easily feel trapped and isolated. Performing at this year's Melbourne Fringe Festival, The Cocoon looks to be one of the more intriguing offerings with its exploration of love and relationships within an interactive and immersive choose your own adventure design.

"The Cocoon explores different aspects of romantic relationships presented in a series of vignettes. There is a couple breaking up, a young gay pair falling in love, a woman reliving her unrequited love and a man rediscovering his love for his partner after their gender reassignment operation," the show's writer and director Kotryna Gesait tells me. "The idea of a "cocoon" is what binds them together, both in a claustrophobic sense and also as a site of metamorphosis and change.

With webbed caverns creating an ethereal environment, audience members are given free access to wonder around and follow whichever story takes their interest for however long they wish. "The design is being conceived by Chantal Marks, a local architect with a set design background. We have a cozy space in Brunswick which we are transforming into the inside of a cocoon," Gesait says. "The idea being that these hyper realistic scenes and monologues will be directly juxtaposed by the other-wordly and dreamlike setting of a cocoon, a space that the audience and the performers closely share. The effect will be intimate, and admittedly maybe a little uncomfortable but I also believe it will have a familiarity for the audience."

Ode To Man | Melbourne Fringe Festival interview

There was a time when the ideal man was depicted as someone physically strong, being unemotional and considered the provider of his family. These stereotypes have done neither men nor women any favours. After her critically acclaimed season at the 2015 Melbourne Fringe Festival with We May Have To Choose, performance artist Emma Mary Hall returns to the festival with Ode To Man, in which she smashes through these stereotypes with poetic rage.

Ode to Man's structure is set around 15 chapters, with Hall exploring what being a 'real' man is, means and should be to both men and women. "The show was sparked by a traumatic break up, which resulted in me spending two years interviewing almost 100 men (including every man I dated during that time) and asking them what it was to be a real man," she explains. "The show is me telling you what I heard. It's also about me trying to figure out how to live with their answers."

Hall premiered this work at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF) earlier this year to a sell-out season for what she refers to as a very personal and strange show. "It was wonderful to be working at the limits of my understanding of the work and what these ideas might say to others. There's a lot of discussion these days about gender and disconnection and confusion, but I don't see much work that is linking this confusion to the social and economic decisions we might make," she tells me.

Top 10 Films at 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival

So two and a half weeks of craziness come to an end yet again! With work and study commitments, I was only able to attend a dismal 34 films this year. Of those 34, I now present you my Top 10 movies from the 2017 Melbourne International Film Festival.

1. Call Me By Your Name

I will preface this by saying that while I am not 100% smitten by Armie Hammer, his charisma throughout this film and the intense chemistry between himself and Timothée Chalamet made watching Call Me By Your Name an incredibly emotive experience. James Ivory's screenplay of André Aciman's novel poignantly captures the intimacy and the heartbreak of these two lovers during the summer in Italy 1983.

Luca Guandagnino's direction creates some amazing aesthetics, although it's probably not hard to do that with the location but credit given where credit due. My only criticism would be the decision to have the final scene with the credits rolling by, as it really took away the powerfulness of that moment.

The Exotic Lives of Lola Montez review | Finucane & Smith | Her Majesty's Ballarat

Lola Montez died when she was 42. And when she was 90. And also when she was 36 and 64 years of age. She died on stage and on a ship. She breathed her last breath in Melbourne and also in Bavaria. So unpredictable and unique was this Irish actor / entertainer's life that it was only a matter of time before a show was created about her, and who better to do that than Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith with The Exotic Lives of Lola Montez. 

A red curtain runs along the back of the stage, with Lola's name hanging on a piece of wood. A chest rests in the middle of the floor, again inscribed with her name. The large, near-empty performance space at Her Majesty's Ballarat could easily dwarf a lesser performer, but fortunately Caroline Lee as the eponymous entertainer (herself a direct descendant of Lola) easily fills the stage with the energy and enthusiasm that Lola would no doubt have possessed. Finucane's signature large, bold movements are evident in her direction, while ensuring that we get to see a vulnerable and (somewhat) honest side to Lola.