Music / Delusions and Grandeur, Karen Hall. At Mill Theatre, Fyshwick, until August 30. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

“The show must go on, but nobody tells you when it’s over,” American cellist and self-styled clown Karen Hall tells her audience during her show, Delusions and Grandeur.

It’s one of many theatrical/musical adages she deconstructs in this unusual show where she mixes “clowning” into her cello playing.

In a partial swipe at classical music conventions, she cautions that audiences shouldn’t clap in between movements and must be very quiet, quickly sizing up her theatrical, not musical, audience.

Clowning might be a misnomer for the kind of physical theatre that she has been practising for the past 10 years, including in this San Diego Fringe-winning show for the past three years, which might best suit an audience of musicians.

Hall kicks off by finishing a Subway sandwich dinner, lettuce bits and all, talking throughout, before leaving and returning in classical concert attire to commence the play proper with Bach’s famous Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major, probably familiar to even the most cello-deprived audience members.

Far from being a series of comedy routines, what follows is essentially a reflection on what it is to be a musician, full of very serious, quiet moments.

Very physical in presentation, she jumps on top of a chair to represents her frustrations, interacts with her audience in short bursts of questions and answers, and canvases the anxiety and related mental health and pain issues among musicians.

We learn that while it’s supposed to  take 10,000 hours to become good at any new skill, she had chalked up far more than that before she’d even got going, so totally demanding is her musical profession.

Hall reflects that playing music by “dead guys” may be absurd. In a rapid-fire series of observations matched with clever costume changes, Hall suggests “maybe we need to modernise” – here she switches to blue jeans.

She shows why the convention of “concert blacks” suits performance on her chosen instrument better than the scanty sequinned outfit she was forced to wear when she took a commercial engagement in Los Angeles and had men looking up her skirt rather than listening to her cello.

She confesses she loves playing Bach, but not hearing other people play Bach.

She notes that there’s no retirement fund for “cello-playing clowns” and since she’s no good at cooking or hula hoop, she’s left with playing cello.

She balances her bow on her index finger and talks, she opens a bag of goodies, which includes more pencils than seems normal – another musician’s quirk.

How to finish? Perhaps, she suggests, as with Bach’s Minuet No. 2, by going back to the beginning then finishing in the middle.

“My cello is my best friend,” she says, “without my cello I am useless.”

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