Review: TIME MACHINE – ADELAIDE FESTIVAL 2024 at Her Majesty's Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Reviewed by Ray Smith, Thursday 14th March 2024.

As we entered the auditorium to see Elizabeth Streb and Streb Extreme Action perform Time Machine at the beautiful Her Majesty's Theatre, there was a soundtrack running of either Streb herself speaking, or another voice quoting her, on her personal history in the arts, her process and her fascination with found objects, their properties and their kinetic potential. The dialogue was largely ignored by the audience, as they busied themselves finding their seats, which was a pity because that was the most interesting thing on offer in Her Majesty's Theatre tonight.

The widely mixed audience in school uniforms, formal wear, and everything in between, were to be treated, we were told, to “a journey through Streb’s career that explores her classic solos from the 70s and 80s, early equipment experimentations from the 90s, and jaw-dropping extreme action opuses with the large scale ‘action machines’ the company has since become known for from the early 21st century”.

After the recorded, and rather perfunctory, welcome to country that I had heard preceding other Adelaide Festival shows, the lights dimmed and the curtains parted to reveal a rather large semi-circular structure, not unlike a giant rocking chair, and some young folks dressed in tight-fitting pseudo superhero outfits, who began cavorting upon this rocking relic, all the while yelling out their positions, their conditions, standing, squatting, crouching, lying down and announcing their next moves as if they couldn't see each other.

It was standard, cheap, vintage circus stuff that was missing only the clown car and some candy floss, but the participants whooped and yelled as if they were doing something extraordinary.

They should all have successful careers in American ‘professional wrestling’, given their over-exaggerated grunts and puffs as they fell artificially heavily from the position of someone doing a push-up. The wildly melodramatic, pointless, and uninteresting performance so far left me feeling embarrassed for the poor kids who were, after all, performing at one of the most prestigious art festivals in the world, and yet appeared to be primary school children pretending to be undergoing a military assault course.

The giant rocking chair was wheeled away and the ‘Streb Extreme Action’ group went through a few silent movie slapstick routines, including the chap with a ladder on his shoulder who turns around and narrowly misses decapitating someone, and even the 'falling wall with Open Window’ trick that Buster Keaton made famous, all performed to whoops and yells, totally ignoring the beauty of the Chaplin, Keaton et al nonchalant approach to these classic visual gags.

It was ghastly. It was utterly American ‘Booya!’ that makes me cringe. I gave it the best part of 30 minutes before leaving the theatre to do something more important, such as putting butter on the cat's boil. Avoid like the plague if over the age of nine.