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Ansuya Nathan: Long Live the King – Adelaide Cabaret Festival 2011

Presented by the Adelaide Festival Centre and the Adelaide Cabaret Festival
Reviewed Sunday 12th June 2011

http://www.adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au/index.aspx
http://www.adelaidecabaretfestival.com.au/Ansuya-Nathan.aspx?showid=15

Venue: Artspace, Adelaide Festival Centre, King William Road, Adelaide
Season: ended
Duration: 70 mins

Ansuya Nathan’s contribution to this year’s Festival is a one person, one act play, dynamically directed by the inimitable Guy Masterson, that draws on her own life story. It concerns the relationships between an Indian couple, Meena, a girl who is fanatical about the music of Elvis Presley, and Vincent, who much prefers The Beatles. As they are about to arrive in Adelaide by aeroplane, she his pregnant wife awaiting their first child, the death of Elvis Presley is announced. He is asleep and does not hear it, so wonders what the fuss is about when he wakes ready to disembark.

The story from this point until after the child is born is told by that child, now a woman, fragmented by a series of flashbacks to the time they met and various points along Meena’s journey, as she becomes the central character. Nathan plays all of the characters in the play: her mother, father, grandmother, uncle, even Steve, the Australian that meets them at the airport, Robert, the man in the flat downstairs who is attracted to Meena and a number of minor roles.

She even gets to play Elvis, donning the famous white one piece jump suit and a wig. Presley’s music is ever present as a background to the piece, inspiring Meena’s moods and actions, although Nathan only sings one of his songs and snatches of others.

Nathan’s tale is a moving account of a woman who has left her home and family at a time when she needs support, finding herself in a strange and uninviting place where an Indian couple are looked on as oddities, and then being left alone all day and night while her husband, a doctor, is working, as well as drinking and flirting with other women.

Nathan does a sensational job of portraying all of the different characters in the narrative, as she weaves her spellbinding tale of fear of the unknown, post-natal depression, rejection and ultimate acceptance and embracing the new. This is a remarkably fine piece of theatre from a local writer/performer.

Reviewed by Barry Lenny, Arts Editor, Glam Adelaide.

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