I knew almost nothing about The Atomic Weight of Happiness before I saw Thursday night’s performance. I had only heard that it was a dance piece starring Meagan O’Shea, who was born with twelve toes (the outliers were surgically removed). My first clue that the show would be something truly unique came when I walked into the theatre – and nearly trampled a tiny campsite. Turns out, The Atomic Weight of Happiness is more than just a dance piece; it’s 60 minutes of unabashed whimsy.

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Mike Delamont is moving up in the world. When Matt reviewed last year’s Fringe Festival performance of God is a Scottish Drag Queen, the venue was so underground that – well, it was the Fort Street Cafe. The venue really was underground. Now Delamont has the much larger stage of the Metro Studio all to himself, flanked on either side by character banners that wouldn’t look out of place on a Comedy Central special. As the audience files in, the show’s (quite nice) typographic logo is projected on either wall of the theatre, like we’re about to see Phantom of the Opera. It is, in short, a little dizzying to see this show in this venue – with a sold-out house – after spending three nights at the Intrepid Theatre Club.

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Dave Morris is a likeable and funny guy, even when he’s running a fever. As he introduced Photo Booth, his improvised storytelling show, Morris warned that what we were about to see might not be “wocka-wocka” hilarious – that it might go to strange, bizarre and even dramatic places – and that he was also fighting off a cold, so his mental faculties were a little impaired. You wouldn’t be able to tell by what followed.

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It’s odd for me to review this show, partly because it feels like coming full circle. Those who have been following us since the beginning will remember that my first review for The Marble – almost the first review on the site – was for Andrew Bailey’s fringe hit Limbo. It was a work that I found moving and hilarious in equal parts, and it was clear that Bailey had been polishing the piece for some time. Fast-forward a year later to the Uno Fest and a chance for me to be a part of the first audience to bear witness to Bailey’s new one-man show, The Adversary.

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Julian Cervello’s Canterbury Cocktails is billed as “a game of charades with the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer,” and that’s a pretty apt description. For 55 minutes, Cervello performs the prologue from The Canterbury Tales – in its original Middle English. As he introduces the twenty-nine characters from the Tales, Cervello adopts their mannerisms and adjusts his (surprisingly versatile) robes to match each new figure’s description. Deciphering the dialect of Chaucer’s time period is tough at first, but eventually becomes manageable – and Cervello leaves the house lights on for those who want to follow along with the glossy, multi-page program.

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Those Who Can’t Do is about teen sex – in fact, it has a one-track mind about it. Every scene and every character is singularly preoccupied with sex. When you create a show like that, you risk ending up with an after-school special: all empty platitudes and abstinence pledges. This show, thankfully, navigates that major pitfall with ease – it never really coalesces into an essential piece of theatre, but it’s honest and sincere.

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I saw this right on the heels of Four Quartets, a high concept dance piece about a great many things. How interesting, then, that I thought the piece about a comedian doing a show that explored the absence of a theme was the stronger of the two. Both are accomplished physical performances of a sort, yet in the end I preferred how little this one took itself seriously.

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I’m really divided on this.

Four Quartets, performer Elizabeth Dunn’s exploration of the metaphysical notions of time and space utilizing the poetry of T.S. Elliot and her considerable skills in movement, is sometimes poignant – and at others, strangely alienating.

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Why do you go to the theatre? Is it for the same reason as most forms of entertainment: it offers you an escape from your life for a couple of hours at a time, hiding out in the drama of a fictional character? If that’s true, then I say that the measure of a great play is that through experiencing the life of that character, we are reminded of why our lives are worth living in the first place as their laughter, tears and thoughts mirror our own. The story of Shirley Valentine is the tale of such a character, and it is in no small thanks to Nicola Cavendish that she is so sublime.

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While there isn’t much time left in this show’s run, I thought it was important to give attention to it as for years Kate Rubin and her students have been a strong force for talented student theatre productions in Victoria. Having been introduced to the world of theatre through her program I jumped at the chance to learn more about her group’s latest production, The Government Inspector. 

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