Craig Stephens in The Cardinals. Photo by Grame Braidwood, Adelaide Festival of Arts.
Presented by Stan’s Café
Reviewed 11 March 2015
Three Christian cardinals and their Muslim stage manager are on tour with their biblical puppet show and, while spreading the Good Word, they discover that their puppets are missing. The Cardinals decide to go ahead with the puppet show by taking the place of the puppets as they clumsily fumble their way through a number of well-known Bible stories.
It sounds like a funny premise for a show, but The Cardinals falls just short of delivering. The 100 minutes of searching for props, dropping scenery and cardinals posing as puppets quickly becomes repetitive and monotonous. The comedy relies heavily on the audience having a reasonable knowledge of the Bible and that the audience have read about the show and are aware that the puppets are missing from the very beginning.
Some expressive performances keep the frantic action feeling madcap and desperate and there are some great moments of interaction between the cardinals and their stage manager but, by the end, one is still left with a dissatisfied feeling that the story never evolved; the production is missing a climax like a good joke missing a punch line.
Flinders Street Baptist Church makes a wonderfully authentic setting for this biblical piece. The set, designed by Miguel Angel Bravo, consisted of a puppet stage and the floor strewn with props. This means that all the puppet action takes place in a small space in the centre. If you sit anywhere other then middle section of the audience, as I did, there are significant sight line problems. There were many times the audience laughed and I had no idea what they were laughing about.
Directed by James Yarker, The Cardinals is a very funny concept but more poignancy and laughter could have been found in this script to make this production much more entertaining and engaging.
Reviewed by Ceri Horner
Twitter: @CeriHorner
Rating out of 5: 2.5
Venue: Flinders Street Baptist Church, Adelaide
Season: 11 – 14 March 2015
Duration: 100 minutes
Tickets: $30-$49
Bookings: Book through the Adelaide Festival online or through BASS online, phone 131 246 (booking fees apply)
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