Review: THE POETRY GARDEN – ADELAIDE FRINGE 2025 at Courtyard At Treasury 1860

Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Sunday 2nd March 2025.

Sitting in a secluded, leafy courtyard on a warm afternoon is a pleasant way to spend an hour, more so sipping on a non-alcoholic beer (I’m allergic to alcohol; really!). It gets even better. Rebecca Vaughan and Andrew Margerison joined forces for their third production in this Fringe, The Poetry Garden, performed in the courtyard of the popular Adelaide cocktail bar and restaurant, The Treasury 1860. They offered an eclectic mix of their favourite poems from a diverse collection of poets, written over several centuries.

Beginning with a cheery self-introduction, and an acknowledgement of the original owners of the land, Vaughan proceeded to recite a poem by the Cornish writer, Charles Causley, who is best known for the poignant work, Eden Rock. On this occasion, though, we were treated to another, more whimsical poem of his, featuring the meeting between a ghost and Colonel Fazackerley Butterworth-Toast, the new owner of a haunted castle. Margerison then turned to the wonderful past Poet Laureate, Sir John Betjeman, with another comical piece, A Subalterns Love Song.

Poetry, along with novels and plays, was taught as part of English lessons when I was at secondary school in England, many decades ago. We had good teachers, who inspired, in our school, at least, a love of the genre. I still possess anthologies of poetry from that time which we had used in our classes. Some poems contained in them were so old that they had been translated from Anglo-Saxon, and others dated from as far back as the 14th Century up to, what were, then, modern works. The well-known names were there, of course: Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth, Burns, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, T. S. Eliot, and so many more, alongside lesser-known poets, and our old friend, Anon.

It is wonderful to have those books in my library, to delve into whenever I wish, but it was a greater pleasure still to, once again, be able to listen to people who know, love, and understand poetry bringing it to life in recitation. That combination of superb actors, and marvellous poetry, was one more of those little nuggets of pure gold that can be found in the Adelaide Fringe, if you look hard enough.

Poetry has been called The Language of Love, and love was the theme of the next few pieces, Vaughan going back first to the 16th Century for John Donne and Margerison turning to the 17th Century poet, Andrew Marvell.

There was Jenny Joseph’s amusing short poem, Warning, a long-time favourite of mine, and Roger McGough’s touching memories of childhood, Soil. A few short poems followed, by Rebecca Swift, Stevie Smith, Mary Oliver, and On a Tired Housewife, by an anonymous poet.

Vaughan took to a more serious note for D.H. Lawrence’s rather longer, introspective poem, The Snake, and Margerison gave us Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130. Love continued as the theme for the next few works from E. E. Cummings, Pablo Neruda, and Edgar Allen Poe’s Annabel Lee.

A sharp change of direction and Margerison invoked the horrors of war with Siegfried Sassoon’s Counterattack and William Butler Yates's poem, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. There was no romanticising in the works of the group known collectively as the war poets.

We heard from activist, Maya Angelou, with Still I Rise, a feminist poem, If Adam Picked the Apple, by Danielle Coffyn, and Robert Frost’s The Road Not Travelled.
 
The performance ended as it began, on a humorous note, with Thomas Hardy’s The Ruined Maid, Margerison playing the Maid, and Vaughan adopting a West Country accent (Hardy was born in Stinsford, Dorset) to play the Maid’s envious friend.

If you love poetry, then this performance is definitely for you, but, if you know nothing about poetry, then this performance is definitely for you. For aficionados, the appeal of great poetry, beautifully spoken, should be obvious, and you should need no convincing to hurry to buy tickets. For newcomers to the genre, this is a perfect introduction, offering such a diverse selection of works presented with great insight and plenty of fun.

Be sure to catch all three of the marvellous performances presented by Dyad Productions this year, but hurry to book; there is only one more performance of The Poetry Garden, at 3pm on Sunday 16th March.

That Knave, Raleigh

A Room of One’s Own