Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Picaresque (Adelaide Festival) ★★★

by
ABR Arts 14 March 2019

Picaresque (Adelaide Festival) ★★★

by
ABR Arts 14 March 2019

For the uninitiated, a maquette is an architectural miniature of a monument or building. Small, made from cardboard or wood, and often able to be flat-packed, travellers have long collected them as souvenirs of adventures to faraway places. Robyn Archer, doyenne of Australian cabaret, has amassed more than most during her forty or so years of global touring (almost always for work rather than pleasure). Around two hundred of them – diligently assembled by a small army of volunteers, and ranging in size from the matchbox-like to a couple of feet tall – feature in the appositely named Picaresque, an episodic travelogue with the lovably roguish Archer at its Don Quixote. 

To enter the space, the audience must pass through the first part of the installation, designed by Wendy Todd. Comprising two walls covered in travel ephemera Archer never threw away – luggage tags, hotel slippers, do-not-disturb signs, laundry bags, boarding passes, eye masks, and more – it’s a vivid, if almost overwhelming, illustration of a life lived in transience.

From the New Issue

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.