Review: Fatboy

This review contains spoilers.

In 2010, it’s difficult to avoid a profound – even a paralysing – pessimism. Everywhere you look, human greed and blind self-interest trump any other consideration. The so-called debate on climate change only demonstrates the hypnotic power of delusion and ignorance; the distortions of political spin and media white noise degrade our language, so that truthfulness is all but impossible or, where possible, inaudible; rationality is gobbled up by psychotic self-deception and spat out as mockery. The ideals of democracy are an illusion, a pantomime choreographed by Fox News and big business.

While the dance of pixels keeps our neurones dormant, behind the scenes we continue the biggest mass species extinction in 65 million years, and pursue pointless wars with deadlier and deadlier weapons that consume a staggering percentage of our increasingly scarce resources. We blindly condemn millions of our fellows to lives of unspeakable misery in the interests of the vampiric demigods of the human race, corporate shareholders. We are a toxic wasteland, a desert of the soul, a calamity.

I’ve sometimes thought the abiding spirit of our times might be Hamlet: there’s a prophetic edge to his description of the skies as “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours”, after all. And how exquisitely he spits on the human promise, so teasingly present in us all, and which, for all the evidence against us, we are so loath to forgo!

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.

Yet there’s another, equally compelling figure who presides over our modernity: against Hamlet’s fatal indecision, Alfred Jarry’s obscene man of action, Ubu. “I make my fortune, snickersnack, then kill the whole world and buggeroff.” You could emblazon that on the coat of arms of Dick Cheney: draft-dodging warmonger and former CEO of oil giant Halliburton, and as Vice President, the brains of the Bush administration. Also, someone whom even Henry Kissinger was moved to describe as “evil”.

Which brings me to Fatboy, John Clancy’s 2006 adaptation of Jarry’s first play, Ubu Roi. It’s the kind of play which makes you laugh all the way through, and leaves you with a kind of bracing blackness. Its absurdity and grotesqueness cut through cant and piety, and brutally reveal how bad things are. Because they really are as bad as all that. Probably worse. The laughter makes it possible to see it, albeit briefly; human beings, as the poet once said, cannot bear very much reality.

Clancy’s adaptation is in the spirit of Jarry’s play, but plays fast and free with the original to update Ubu to contemporary America (and by extension, the wealthy west – this is all performed in Australian accents, except for a wonderful speech that mashes some notorious presidential quotes). Fatboy (Daniel Frederiksen) is a man of insatiable appetite: he literally devours money, to the continual despair of his wife Fudgie (Olga Makeeva). In the first act, after their obligatory trading of insults, she sends him out into the world to find a job while Fudgie, a woman of insatiable appetites herself, seduces a prospective tenant (Adam Pierzchalski). Fatboy’s idea of a job is to murder a bank full of people and empty their pockets: he returns triumphant, murders the tenant who cuckolds him, and vows to continue his violent career.

The following act sees him being prosecuted for crimes against humanity. It reminds me, in its absurdity, of the court scene in The Magic Pudding (a story which, in its own way, reveals almost as bleak a view of humanity as Jarry). This act contains the best incidence of a running gag in which impassioned gestures are made towards human nobility: the judge makes a moving speech about the inalienability of human rights, to stunned silence: and then, after a long pause, the entire cast falls about laughing. I can’t think of a better representation of the gap between governmental pieties about justice, and their unjust actions.

Finally, Fatboy becomes ruler of the world, which is not as much fun as he thought it would be: he finds that he has devoured everything, and there is nothing left to eat: no more wheat, no more milk, no more cows. He is reduced to eating his own crown. There is an attempted assassination, and so he kills everybody. The End.

Well, not quite the end: there is an apparently improvised epilogue, in which the actors remove their costumes, and Fatboy walks into the audience to tell us that we, arseholes, are him. This is the weakest part of the play, since the message has long been hammered home: it’s our unbridled consumerism that drives this destruction. But it’s funny, all the same.

It’s perfect for Red Stitch’s tiny stage, which is transformed into a Jarry-esque puppet theatre behind a lush red curtain (Jarry thought that the main thing wrong with theatre was the actors, and that they ought to be replaced with puppets). It’s a wonderful, anarchic production of the play: director Marcelle Schmitz picks up and plays all the louche theatricality of the text, backed by Peter Mumford’s cartoonish design of painted flats. There’s a good dose of meta-theatricality, with white-face actors asking permission to leave the stage so they can change costume for their next role, a puppet show between acts where Fatboy eats the puppet, and loud thumps and sotte voce cursing backstage as the sets are changed between acts.

Schmitz has an excellent cast, who play the grotesquerie to the hilt: I loved all the performances, especially Frederikson (“I am Fatboy, and I am titular!”) In the smaller roles, all doubled, the three supporting actors, Adam Pierzchalski, Dion Mills and Andrea Swifte, are hard to beat, and Olga Makeeva as Queen Fudgie generates a peculiarly grotesque sex appeal. It’s not a place to look for subtlety: this is a theatre of broad, obvious gesture. The language is limber and witty enough to to keep you interested, and its constant inventive obscenity creates a compelling poetic.

As political theatre, this kind of rambunctious satire is vastly preferable to the wan politicising of a David Hare, because it does nothing to pacify the audience. It’s rude, crude, vital and very, very angry. Does it make a difference? Only in the way the art does: there is a liberation in contemplating the truth of our circumstances, that might combat the paralysis that otherwise would overwhelm us. The naming of the terrible is a hope in itself. When actual – as opposed to delusive – hope seems about as endangered as the thylacine, that seems no bad thing to me.

Picture: Daniel Frederiksen as Fatboy, ruling the world at Red Stitch.

Fatboy, by John Clancy, directed by Marclle Schmitz. Design by Peter Mumford, lighting design by Stelios Karagiannis, costume design Olga Makeeva and Peter Mumford, sound design by Russel Goldsmith. With Daniel Frederiksen, Olga Makeeva, Adam Pierzchalski, Andrea Swifte and Dion Mills. Red Stitch until April 17. Bookings: 9533 8083.

Review: PropagandA

But who are they, tell me, these vagrants, a little
more fugitive even than us, in their springtime
so urgently wrung by one who – who pleases
a never contented will? So it wrings them,
bends them, twists them, swings them,
flings them and catches them behind: out of the oil-smooth
air they come down
onto the flimsy carpet worn
by their eternal leaping, this forlorn
carpet lost in the universe.

Fifth Duino Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke

Circus might appear to be the most ideology-free of the arts, but it has a long tradition of association with revolutionaries and avant garde artists. In the early 20th century, poems by writers as diverse as Osip Mandelstam and Rainer Maria Rilke demonstrated their fascination with the circus. Kafka wrote stories set in the sideshow and the ring of the big top; Picasso painted the acrobats. And Vladimir Mayakovsky, the exemplary poet of the Russian Revolution, wrote plays for it, and collaborated from his early years with the Bolshevik clown Vitaly Lazarenko. Circus was, in fact, a key arm of the Soviet Union’s propaganda machine, inside and outside Russia; for many years, the Moscow Circus was Russia’s most friendly international face.

More recently, our very own Circus Oz, which with troupes such as San Francisco’s The Pickle Family Circus and New York’s The Big Apple Circus in New York reinvented circus in the 1970s, evolved out of the avant garde practice and revolutionary ideals of the Pram Factory. This tradition of subversive populism remains alive and well in Australian theatre, as is brilliantly demonstrated by the family troupe Acrobat.

Acrobat is one of the treasures of regional Australia. A husband and wife team (Simon Yates and Jo Lancaster, with appearances from their children Grover and Fidel) hailing from Albury, they’ve generated an enthusiastic international following with their low-tech, highly skilled theatrical circus. And no wonder: these are exceptional performers, whose mix of unpredictable comedy and astounding physical feats creates irresistible entertainment.

PropagandA – as its poster demonstrates – draws consciously on the tradition of Soviet social realist propaganda. Lancaster and Yates stand proudly in front of a green star, striding forth as the idealised man and woman of the future. Naturally, the show itself collides, sometimes violently, with this professed idealism: the first performance is a duet of acrobatics – backgrounded by one of their children playing chopsticks on an amplified keyboard – in which the two of them struggle into impossible structures which then, always, collapse.

Finally Lancaster gives up and lies stretched out on the ground. Yates drags her by her ankle off to the side, strips off most of her clothes, dresses her passive body in a kangaroo costume topped by a fluffy rabbit, and gives her a bass electric guitar. She stands bare-breasted in a spotlight wearing this absurd, slightly disturbing costume and plays a grunting riff, tonelessly singing lyrics about banal domesticity. This was the first time I got goosebumps.

The rest of the show consists of the usual circus acts – aerial and trapeze performances, the slack wire, the bicycle act, the pole, the leap from a springboard – all executed with an astounding skill that allows them to play with the idea of failure. Each act becomes a metaphor, usually of domesticity, and is given a comic spin. The absence of decoration means that the emphasis falls fiercely on the performers, and I’m not sure that I’ve seen any of these acts done better. They are miraculous.

The aesthetic here is anti-glamour – the costumes are all brown, and the performers often appear with white Y-front drawn up over their brown shirts. The rigger is, slightly mysteriously, dressed as an early 20th century Eastern European Jew, complete with false beard. Sound and lighting are operated in full sight at the side of the stage, and props are arranged around the edge of the circle, to be thrown away when they’re no longer needed. Children wander across the stage, performing obscure tasks. Or maybe just wandering. It’s a little like being in someone’s kitchen, assuming of course that a kitchen can be a circus.

The propaganda of the title is double-edged. On the one hand, this show lightly explores the insidious conditionings of consumerist, capitalist society, the sub-lunar commands that define the roles of man and woman, family and worker, imprisoning their possibilities. On the other, it has its own message: at one point a child is dressed in ragged hessian wings and lifted on a trapeze, where he shows us handwritten cards on which are written, in wonky capitals, things like BE KIND or GARDEN NUDE or USE ONLY WHAT YOU NEED. If only all propaganda were so benign.

You are most aware that this is a family performing. In the final act, Lancaster and Yates circle on a bike performing acrobatics, pursued by a remote control megaphone shouting BUY A CAR or GET OFF THE ROAD. At one point, I found myself moved to tears. It was, I think, a very small gesture of reassurance, as Yates touched Lancaster’s leg as she climbed onto his shoulders. It seemed expressive of the purest trust. Perhaps it revealed what is rendered invisible by the puissant skill of these performers: the risk and danger of what they do. And I should add that for all the seriousness of this review, this is a joyous show, leaving you with the lightness of heart that is the gift of performance.

PropagandA, conceived and performed by Simon Yates and Jo Lancaster, featuring Grover and Fidel Lancaster-Cole. Production manager/rigger, Scott Grayland/Ryan Taplin. Music director, Tim Barrass. acrobat, commissioned by HotHouse @North Melbourne Arts House Meat Market until April 3. On tour internationally from May.

Review: My Stories, Your Emails

You might have noticed that Ms TN is pretending that the Melbourne International Comedy Festival is not happening. If the Melbourne Fringe sends me into a tailspin, contemplating the MICF causes flat-out panic. This is not a syndrome that afflicts punters; it is an anxiety peculiar to crrritics, who all (the real ones, that is) start looking haggard about this time of year, as if they have been indulging in absinthe in grotty night clubs while pondering Jean-Paul Sartre’s observations on the nausea of existence. Ms TN, however, is innocent and blithe and, above all, ignorant of all this. I am wearing my novelist’s hat and, as everyone knows, that means being grimly chained to a desk and having no fun at all.

This hat is not quite nailed on, however, which means that every now and then it slips off. So it happened that, in the course of my normal theatre-going last week, I saw by accident a couple of very funny shows. One – Ursula Martinez’s My Stories, Your Emails at the Malthouse – is, in fact, part of the Comedy Festival. The second, acrobat’s PropagandA (of which more later), on this week at the North Melbourne Meatmarket, isn’t. Both are slyly subversive and wholly entertaining works of theatre, and are highly recommended.

Ursula Martinez is best known for her magic act Hanky Panky. A highlight of the popular burlesque show La Clique, it is a witty, wickedly sexy takedown of striptease. Martinez enters in a prim business suit, her hair drawn back tightly in a bun. The one intimation of lust is a red handkerchief, which she makes disappear, and then discovers in items of clothing which she removes. At last, there is no more clothing to hide it: but she still makes it disappear. In the intimate environs of the Spiegeltent, which is where I originally saw it, I thought I had never seen such a subversively erotic act: it was notable for Martinez’s sexual self-possession, how, even when she was completely naked, she was never reduced to a mere object of the audience’s gaze.

However, in 2006 the act was filmed and uploaded, without her consent, to the internet. Martinez plays the video during the course of My Stories, Your Emails, and it’s striking how filming the striptease changes the nature of the act. It remains subversive and comic, but something crucial has shifted: it removes Martinez’s direct relationship with an audience. In a video, the watching eye is dominant in a way that doesn’t happen in live performance, wholly overturning the feminist subtext of the original act. And into the vacuum caused by her physical absence rush the lively fantasies of the voyeur.

After the video appeared, Martinez was bombarded by thousands of fannish emails. My Stories, Your Emails is a consistently hilarious and often uncomfortable exploration of the gap between her idea of herself, and those projected onto her image by her sometimes deluded fans.

The show, as she explains in a straight-up introduction, is divided into two parts. The first – fragmentary, almost poetic narratives about herself and her family – consists of her stories. They build up a complex and contradictory picture of a bi-cultural upbringing in London, exploring the intricacies and brutalities of class and race, sibling rivalries and cruelties, a vexed relationship with her father, brushes with celebrity (performing at Salman Rushdie’s stag night) and brief observations: a football crowd in a pub, an encounter in a lift.

The second half consist of emails and photographs she received after her act was uploaded to a porn site. These vary from the obscene (“Eric”, who sent her photographs of his penis before and after watching her video, helpfully telling her its dimensions) to Niko, a young Australian whose open and naive confession of his sexual loneliness is as painful as it is funny. There are the enthusiastic naturists who wish her good luck in all her nude activities, the Latino gentlemen seeking a discreet affair, and the Californians who practice Tantric sex and whose physical exertions should never be tried at home by anyone who isn’t a Yogi.

The contrast between the two ideas of Martinez is what drives the energy of the show. Martinez lightly invokes a darker subtext – racism, familial abuse, grief and, especially in the second half, loneliness and delusion – that ensures My Stories, Your Emails is never merely glib, or merely cruel. Martinez doesn’t moralise – she leaves that to her audience – but the show feels like a reclamation of sorts. Also, it’s very, very funny.

As an aside, this show caused a bit of a ruckus when it premiered at the Barbican in the UK. As Matt Trueman reported in the Guardian, amid some glowing four-star reviews were others which expressed discomfort or even outrage at the show’s ethics. Financial Times critic Ian Shuttleworth wondered about the provenance of her use of the images and words of others. “Her own intimacies are hers to peddle,” he said. “Other people’s, even if sent to her unsolicited, are not.” Others wondered whether she had permission to identify her correspondents (where they are identified, she does have permission, as is clear in the course of the show), and claimed she was “punishing” men for expressing desire. In short, there was quite a lot of moral frothing.

There’s no doubt that this show is sometimes uncomfortable viewing, and that the expressions of loneliness in those emails can be movingly sad. But it’s noticeable that somehow in this argument Martinez was again erased. Nobody mentioned the dynamic that drives the show: the transformation of an empowering expression of female sexuality into the passive objectification of porn. Martinez here simply exposes the mechanics of that transformation.

In its original context, Hanky Panky caused exactly the effect it intended: reduced and flattened onto a screen in a private room, it became something entirely different. Without any editorialising, My Stories, Your Emails explores one of the major dilemmas of the age of instant celebrity and internet reproducibility: context is what you make it, and the virtual trumps the real. When Martinez strips at the end of the show to deliver the promised “minge”, she simply takes off her clothes, as casually as if she were about to have a shower, and stands naked before her audience. She is no sex bomb, simply a naked woman with the chutzpah to make fun of her own body. And most of all, you know it is her body.

A shorter version of this review was published in Friday’s Australian.

Picture: Ursula Martinez in My Stories, Your Emails.

My Stories, Your Emails, created and performed by Ursula Martinez, directed by Mark Whitelaw. Originally commissioned by Barbicanbite10 and Queer Up North International Festival, England. Malthouse Theatre @ the Melbourne International Comedy Festival . Beckett Theatre, CUB Malthouse, until April 3.

Reviews elsewhere

Let me remind you about John Bailey’s mandatory Capital Idea blog – not least because the Hon. John, reviewer for the Sunday Age, gets to many shows I miss. In particular, check out his recommendations on Sisters Grimm’s Little Mercy (which I did see, but which he explicates to a greater depth) and Nichola Gunn’s At the Sans Hotel, now in its final days at Theatreworks, which I didn’t.

Because I should be writing my novel…

…I decided to do some ego-graphing. Different from, and hopefully more accurate than, the creative eco-graphing practised by Andrew Bolt and suchlike Climate Change Denialists, but just as pretty.

So look, here is the graph of TN’s daily readership From The Beginning, circa 2004. It is similar to mean global temperatures from 1880, but has a cheerier subtext. TN has totalled 708,000 unique visitors! Admittedly, some of them were using search terms like “sex with animals” or even “croggon tits naked”, but hell, some of them must have read something!

And here is the graph for the past year, with a total of 222,000 unique visitors, or an average of around 17,000 visitors a month. I know it’s modest compared to the intertube superstars, but I used to distribute – by hand – a quarterly literary magazine that had a global circulation of 300, and so daily visits sometimes even spiking past 1000 seems a lot to me.

Which all proves that glaciers are melting at an unprecedented rate, as asserted by my father’s friend Jacka (educated like my father at the famous Camborne School of Mines) who actually goes to visit them.

Here endeth the lesson.

Review: Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin)

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this review contains the name of a deceased person.

Many people will have first encountered the Chooky Dancers on YouTube. Their hilariously unlikely Yolngu version of Zorba the Greek became a viral hit, scoring 1.5 million viewers.

They come from Elcho Island (Galiwin’ku), which is north east of Arnhemland. They live in a poverty which ought to make all Australians ashamed: 25 people share a house where the wiring is falling out of the walls, and where there is often not enough food to ensure that people do not go hungry. People die every week from the many complications of poverty: as if to illustrate this, Frank Garawirrtja, the mentor behind the Chooky Dancers and the Wrong Skin project, died during the process of making the show. Wrong Skin in fact features footage from his funeral.

In 2007, the Howard Government launched the aggressive military intervention policy, which was imposed without consultation with the communities involved. This paternalism – continued under Labor – was supposedly to combat Indigenous deprivation, but its effect has only been to further disenfranchise an already scandalously deprived community. As many community leaders have protested, their rights have been taken away, and many claim it’s part of a larger policy to extinguish land rights and Indigenous culture.

Nigel Jamieson canvasses all these issues in Wrong Skin. It’s a show that emerges from a community little understood in wider Australia, and like Honour Bound – Jamieson’s physical theatre piece about the Guantanamo Bay prisoner David Hicks – it is driven by a profound political anger. But what you come away with is a vital joyousness, the rebellious humour and resilience of the Yolngu people, that shows the other side of the doom-laden headlines. Indigneous people have often responded to their situations with subversive humour, and the Chooky Dancers are no exception.

This is a difficult show to write about, not least because it requires complicated explanation that the show itself manages to eschew, reaching into the immediacy and vitality of performance to make its various points. Jamieson has put together a multimedia spectacular that enacts the cultural contradictions of contemporary globalism, where Yolgnu in one of the most remote regions of Australia download Bollywood and hiphop to their mobile phones and cheerfully appropriate Singin’ in the Rain into traditional dance. The whole is strung together by a simple Romeo and Juliet story of forbidden love between Yolgnu of the same Yirridja moiety (a relationship which is strictly forbidden), illustrating the tensions between western ideas of individual freedom and traditional law.

Very little of the narration is in English (English hasn’t been taught in remote schools since the 1970s, and many Yolgnu don’t speak it)*. But the action, assisted by some miraculous use of multi-media, is crystal clear. The dancers each introduce themselves, identifying their clans and moieties, and then introduce the story. The rest is a kind of patchwork of song and dance and film, woven together to enact a mimesis of life on Elcho Island: its sorrows and imprisonments – which are starkly demonstrated – and its delights – dance, fishing, play.

To the European mind, the complexities of kinship in Indigenous society is mind-boggling. Skin names or moieties and clan affiliations govern your language, your totem, your clan and every aspect of social interaction with other people and with the land. Your skin name determines who you can marry, and who you are forbidden to even speak to. To complicate things further, the cyclical kinship patterns mean that your great-grandmother can be your child, and your great-grandchild your mother.

Take, for example, the term “Yolngu”. Yolngu means “person”, and can mean someone specifically from East Arnhemland, or simply an Aboriginal person. The term Yolngu Matha covers the more than 100 languages spoken by the clans of East Arnhemland. According to anthropologist Emma Kowel, Yolngu inherit their language from their father, but adults generally speak at least five languages, and often understand 15 or more. In short, to understand what any 10-year-old Yolngu knows is a life-time study for an outsider. I can’t quite get my head around this stuff: this is a culture that challenges basic western notions of possession and relationship, and which blurs together into a holistic and collective world view concepts that in western traditions are clearly distinguished from each other.

Jamieson employs all the resources of the stage to communicate some of this complexity, and along the way creates spectacular theatre. There are extraordinarily beautiful scenes which seamlessly meld film and live performance, such as those set in the actual home of the Chooky Dancers. The camera climbs up the rotting steps, enters the dark hallways, lingers over the holes in the walls, and wakes up the boys, who rise from the stage floor, turn on the tv to see a Bollywood film – which they turn into their own dance routine (something really to be seen). The result is a powerful mixture of documentary realism and the joyous celebration of live performance.

Perhaps the real triumph of Wrong Skin is how it opens a small window on this world, while managing to avoid the falsities of worthiness or patronisation. Being there is a delight: the sheer exuberance of the young dancers carries the day. Its tragedy is enacted lucidly, although it occurs outside the cultural referents I understand; and the whole show powerfully reveals the beauty of this ancient culture, its adaptiveness and curiosity, while unsparingly showing the conditions in which it survives. I liked too how the process of making this work – clearly a complex and difficult one – is folded into the work itself. Not to be missed.

Top: The Chooky Dancers on YouTube. Bottom: The Chooky Dancers in Wrong Skin. Photo: Matt Nettheim

Ngurrumilmarrmiriyu (Wrong Skin), written, directed and designed by Nigel Jamieson in association with the company. Associate director/movement, Gavin Robins; associate director/community and cultural liaison Joshua Bond; costumes by Mathew McCall; film and video design by Scott Anderson, video production by Mic Gruchy, lighting designer Trudy Dalgleish, composition and sound design David Page and Basil Hogios, film footage by Gavin Robins, Scott Anderson, Alan Dowler and Nigel Jamieson. Malthouse Theatre until March 28.

Performers: Djakapurra Munyarrun, Djali Donald Ganambarr, Frances Djulibing, Rarriwuy Hick, Anthony Djamangi, Lionel Dhulmanawuy and Anthony Djamangi.

Chooky Dancers: Aaron Djimilkinya, Daren Matan, Nathan Guymangura, Gerald Dhamarrandji and Wakara Gondarra.

*See Mark Lawrence’s comment below for a correction.

Why crrritics must have no taste

For your Monday morning rumination: a thought provoking post on criticism from Maladjusted. It syncs very well with my long-held view that opinion (what Robert Brustein calls “Himalaya criticism”) is the least of criticism. An excerpt (emphasis mine):

Good criticism (of art, of music or whatever) has something in common with good philosophical and theological debate, both of which have nothing to do with the ‘I’ll name your beliefs and you name yours’ game which makes people rightly think that argument about things on which people have different proclivities is a kind of social disorder. After all, both philosophy and theology have their raison d’etre in uncertainty (which is why religious fundamentalists tend to hate theology as either dangerous sophistry or feeble equivocating). However, this doesn’t necessarily lead either philosophers or theologians to quietistic silence, mysticism or hand-waving. On the contrary, the fact that truth may be ultimately elusive, has never stopped anyone but the most bloodlessly indifferent people from thinking that it shouldn’t be sought, or reaching Socrates’ conclusion that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living.

…at the heart of criticism, there is always something apart from our desire to express to others who we are. Instead, there is a fascination with the object, with the thing that made us start writing, with music or art or literature (as a region in which certain beings, certain strange and shining creatures can appear to us in certain ways). It involves an implicit belief (and most beliefs are implicit) that there is something revealed to us in music, intimated in art, given to us in the things that we most appreciate, but obscured in the things that we do not. In this sense, a good critic is someone who lacks the glibness of the way we normally rack up tastes: she’s someone who wants to try and give voice to the strange language of the things that she’s witnessed, to act in fidelity to the truths that she has endured.

Review: Triple Bill of Wild Delight, Little Mercy

The oft-asserted wisdom behind the categories “Fringe” and “Mainstream” runs something like this: the mainstream is mainstream because it is more fun, while the fringe is the fringe because it’s so unremittingly serious its arty eyebrows disappear up its own fundament.

As those who read Ms TN with attention will know, she is a mortal enemy to these categories. Because one needs some kind of general handle, I prefer the slightly less unsatisfactory “main stage” and “independent” for distinguishing between companies with large institutional structures and those running on rags and hope, and I certainly never use them as aesthetic predictors or descriptors. Otherwise you fall into absurdities, such as Peter Craven’s and Robin Usher’s claims a few years ago that artists such as Jérôme Bel or Romeo Castellucci – who have played some of the largest venues in Europe – are “anti-mainstream”. Whatever that means.

Anyway, the point is that fun occurs, or doesn’t occur, across the entire spectrum of theatre. (Actually, “fun” is a depressing word, which for me evokes the spectre of cocktails with suggestive names in bleakly desperate nightclubs, or The Footy Show, or a certain scoutmaster I once encountered who had an extraordinary talent for killing any kind of social enjoyment by shouting: “Now everybody listen! We’re all supposed to be having fun here! Will the mums stop chatting and line up so we can wrap them in toilet paper, ok? We’re all having fun! Ok?”)

There’s “pleasure”. Or “delight”. Spontaneous joy. Whatever. It’s a lightness of being that rises involuntarily and lifts us momentarily out of time on a gust of laughter. Like happiness, it can’t be commanded – which is why that scoutmaster got it so wrong, and why it’s so sheerly embarrassing to watch a bad comedian. In such moments of delight, we forget the weight of ourselves. We become bigger than we are, and more innocent; we might gasp at comic savagery, but our souls are never shrivelled by its calling to our meaner selves. So while the Sam Newmans of this world might claim they’re “just having a bit of fun” by saying black people are just like monkeys, they never inspire delight. Sam’s just saying he’s the biggest boot on the block, and his obsequious followers snigger in the bully’s shadow.

True delight is liberation rather than such enslavement. For instance, on Friday I spent five hours at La Mama, at Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith’s Triple Bill of Wild Delight! (It comes with an exclamation mark). On a balmy autumn evening, the moon swinging high over our heads, it was hard to think of anywhere better to be. We arrived to find La Mama’s courtyard decked out as a cantina, with coloured lights and candle-lit tables, serving pre-show sangria and barbecued corn cobs and chorizos, before being ushered into Finucane’s one-woman storytelling fantasia, The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina. Argentina Gina Catalina is – well, what is she? Her footsteps melt the pavement where she walks; her deadly gaze can freeze the hearts of two thousand pirates; she’s the daughter of wolves and whales and a priestess who can make a cascade of oranges fall out of the sun. She is the embodiment of excess and desire, and she carries the tropes of magical realism beyond parody, into sheer hilarious poetry.

Finucane’s performance is as over-the-top as her gorgeous costumes; she ignites a spectacle of desire that somehow, for all its excess, unwaveringly maintains its own reality. Duende, maybe? The sensuality of the language takes cliche and sets it on fire; even as our credulity is mischievously mocked by more and more outrageously absurd stories, we believe in Argentina Gina Catalina. In between each narrative, we’re fed and watered with various delicious titbits: olives, bread, Spanish cured meats, mussels steamed in boullibaise, chocolate cake, ice cream and tequila (the food is provided by KT Prescott).

After a half hour’s break in the Pleasure Garden, there’s contemporary circus with Azaria Universe, Jesse Love and Derek Ives in Tooth & Nail: a show with trapeze and aerial acts (astounding in La Mama – who would have thought it?) in which the traditional circus tropes – especially the sexy showgirl – are undermined, mocked and also brilliantly realised. We still, after all, want to see deeds of derring do, even if the co-stars are bickering and putting razor-blades in each other’s toffee apples. The final act, in which the naked performers stand before us wearing huge cartoon animal heads, is so blazingly strange that it knocks the performance into some other dimension. Perverse, disturbing and oddly beautiful.

And after that comes Salon de Dance DELUGE, hosted by Maude Davey, which features an all-star cast of performers mainly drawn from Melbourne’s rich dance scene. It features 19 acts, performed inside and outside La Mama; they range from the absurd (two identical Frauleins with blond pigtails performing a bawdy version of the lederhosen slapping dance, or Moira Finucane, dressed as a prim waitress, orgasmically eating a meat pie to AC/DC’s TNT) to the beautiful (Brian Lucas, performing a dance of yearning as he rises operatically from a sea of red fabric) to the macabre (Yumi Umiumare’s weeping, faceless woman dancing in a dark forest, or Finacune’s later adventures with a sauce bottle, as excruciating a performance of sexual loneliness as anything I’ve seen). Or there’s Christopher Green’s recital of Molly Bloom, as you’ve never heard it before, which gives us, as he points out, some “proper acting”. As, indeed, it does.

Everything is directed with unobtrusive slickness: food is served, theatres re-dressed, costumes changed, tomato sauce mopped, with never a glitch in the action. Stage manager Cath Carmody must be working harder than anyone else in Melbourne. She and her staff of enablers, plus the first-class performers, add up to a show that reminds us why life is worth living. It’s wit, poetry, hilarity, nonsense, pleasure, beauty, all rolled into a gloriously subversive, wickedly sexy evening that nourishes both soul and body. You can book each show separately, but I recommend seeing the lot if you possibly can. Long live Finucane and Smith, I say.

The night before, your fearless correspondent was pursuing pleasure at the Collingwood Underground Carpark. Plunging like a dark mouth beneath the tower blocks of Collingwood, it seems at first glance an unlikely venue for seekers of delight: but enter past the forbidding portal, and you are in another world, possibly Berlin circa 1984, where gorgeous denizens of the underworld gather around an incongruously cosy bar, as music blares at a decibel level beyond the range of the human ear.

The occasion here was Sisters Grimm’s production of Little Mercy. At the proper time – or, to be more accurate, a little after the proper time – audience members were led along a path in the darkness marked out, like an airport landing strip, by rows of candles, to a surprisingly intimate theatre scratched together somewhere in the bowels of the carpark.

Little Mercy is an absurdity devised by Declan Greene and Ash Flanders, a fond pisstake of that staple of Hollywood horror movies, the demon child. Roger Summers (Sean-James Murphy) and his wife Virginia (Ash Flanders) are the successful power couple: he is a celebrated musical director, his wife a successful glamour alcoholic. There is only one grief in their life: they have no child. As the play opens, they are rushing off to the premiere of Annie when Virginia (searching for her earrings) discovers a letter from an orphanage mysteriously left beneath a couch. Just as she reads the contents, lightning flashes, thunder rolls and the child itself, Mercy (Susie Dee, in frilly dress and pigtails) appears at their front door.

A carnivorous cuckoo, Mercy settles into the house and begins her murderous career by killing the adored but ancient cat (a stuffed toy which scuttles in and out of the stage on a skateboard) and blinding her tutor (Cara Mitchell) by substituting sulphuric acid for her eye drops. The one difference from the Hollywood version is that, instead of being sent back to the Abyss from whence she came, Mercy wins the day.

It’s acted with the appropriate po-faced melodramatic passion by its cast, with some ingenious stage tricks and multi-media. In some ways, it recalls The Thirty Nine Steps, which the MTC produced in 2008: it has the same light hearted delight in meta-theatrical camp, the same low-tech pleasures. And the production and performances are high quality, with Ash Flanders as the soft-hearted innocent Virginia stealing the night, so by the end I wholly believed his performance. Nonsense, yes, but irresistibly funny nonsense, delivered with brio and flair.

Finucane & Smith’s Triple Bill of Wild Delight: The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina, Salon de Dance DELUGE and Tooth & Nail. Devised by Moira Finucane and Jackie Smith, with numerous collaborators. La Mama Theatre, until March 28. Check the La Mama website for details of performance times.

Little Mercy, by Ash Flanders and Declan Greene, directed by Declan Greene. Costume design by Alice Swing, lighting design by Katie Sfetkidis, print media design by Andrew Downer. With Ash Flanders, Cara Mitchell, Sean-James Murphy and Susie Dee. Sisters Grimm @ Collingwood Underground Carpark, 48 Harmsworth St, Collingwood, until March 27. Bookings: Sisters Grimm.

The Green Rooms (& some Airplay)

Ms TN is not a morning person. I was supposed to be at Footscray Hospital bright and early this a.m. so I could be injected with radioactive isotopes and put on a treadmill (don’t ask) but yesterday I entirely forgot about this appointment and drank a vat of coffee, thus invalidating the whole exercise. So I had to heave my carcass out of bed early so I could phone the Department of Nuclear Medicine, confess my idiocy and cancel the medical experiment.

So perhaps I was in a slightly misanthropic mood when I studied the Green Room Awards press release listing 2009’s winners, announced last night, which slid into my inbox first thing this morning. But I suspect that even had I bounced out of bed with a happy cry and greeted the dawn with rapture, my sunniness might have been a little eclipsed. It is a duty to disagree with awards, but it’s been a while since I’ve felt so at odds with their results.

Awards in the arts are always contentious. They depend, for a start, on committees of people agreeing on something, and in areas like the arts, perceptions of quality are inevitably – and in my view, necessarily – subjective. Even so, the conservatism of this year’s theatre awards is notable. Not that conservatism is, in itself, a bad thing – I don’t have many quibbles with Robyn Nevin’s gong for Best Female Performer, for her extraordinary performance in August: Osage County, nor for Simon Phillips’ direction, his best for years. But When The Rain Stops Falling as best mainstage production? And that script the best new writing of last year?

Michael Kantor’s Malthouse production of Happy Days – one of the shows of last year, and Kantor’s best direction yet – didn’t even make the shortlist for production or direction. (And yet the Malthouse’s indifferent production of Knives in Hens was up for both direction and best production.) Equally baffling is Daniel Schlusser’s superb and thoughtful Life is a Dream losing out in the indie best direction to Bagryana Popov’s disappointingly banal take on Chekhov, Progress and Melancholy.

There are, of course, worthy winners among them. You can’t miss the target all the time. But I might drink another vat of coffee today, as I reflect on the world’s folly and resistance to quality.

*

On a cheerier note, I hear that ABC Radio National’s Airplay is broadcasting Corvus, a beautiful script by ex-Melburnian and now Berliner Jasmine Chan. Featuring Bojana Novakovic and Ming-Zhu Hii, it will be worth twiddling the dial to hear this one. It goes to air on Saturday, March 28. While I’m at it, look out for Paul English reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet on ABC Radio’s First Person, airing from May 24-28. Now, that’s writing.

Review: Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise

If you haven’t heard of Harry Kondoleon, as I hadn’t before seeing this play, let me fill you in on my googling. Kondoleon blazed briefly over Manhattan in the 1980s, before he died of AIDS in 1994 at the age of 39. As a playwright, he is often compared to Christopher Durang, John Guare and Joe Orton, though he has a formalist edge that have led critics to call in Pirandello. In the decade before his death, he published a volume of poetry and wrote a few novels, produced several plays and mounted an exhibition of paintings, along the way winning a swag of awards.

Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise was the first of his plays to be produced in New York City. It’s a bizarre comedy of manners, kind of like Seinfeld on acid. Although what it mostly reminded me of was the melancholy menace excavated by the anonymous genius behind the webite Unhappy Hipsters, with the neurotic subtext of these utopian visions of urban life brought to its full insane efflorescence.

The plot, such as it is, involves a writer, Carl (Mick Lo Monaco), who declares his love for Bethany (Kristina Brew) to her husband, Alvin (Josh Price), at a dinner party. After Carl – literally – carries Bethany off, Carl’s wife Adele (Marissa Bennett), who has recently attempted suicide over her husband’s infidelity, arrives at Alvin’s apartment. She intends to kill Carl or, at the very least, to write a roman de clef exposing him for the tool he is.

It’s one of those plays that attacks the mode of naturalism it lightly adopts, puncturing its surface with hysteric extremity and poetic segues in which the various characters pursue the non sequiturs of their inner lives. I think it’s mightily over-written, but it has an attractive charge and power which explains why Ben Pfeiffer and his colleagues at Artisan Collective chose to perform it. This is a very classy production of a difficult play: Pfeiffer meets the play’s attack on form with a stylised energy that opens a new take on the possibility of language in the theatre.

It’s performed in traverse, with the minimal design suggesting an urban, contemporary domestic interior (vase of dead twigs, metallic underlit tables). The performances literalise the manic emotional twists of the script with an over-the-top physicalisation that twists this production towards movement theatre. The actors take each gesture to an extreme, so behaviour becomes an exaggerated language of Tourettian tics that emphasises the lack of communication between each character.

They are all essentially solitary: their lives are sterile, self-referential and self-consuming, and the deepest drive in each of them is a fear of being alone. Carl is (as he intones several times) a Writer, and thus doomed to a life of witnessing rather than participating. He is the cliche of the literary predator who exploits the women in his life for his work, as subject matter and office dogsbodies. Alvin lives in a fog of goodness that means he has no connection with reality at all: in his city garden and his domesticity he attempts to find the fertility and plenty that is missing from his life. The two women are creatively barren, a lack which finds its outlet in their neuroticism. Adele munches Valium as she tries to escape the house that is trying to kill her, and Beth, who blames Alvin for losing her inner poetic self, thinks the earth beneath her feet is moving. Which, as Alvin points out, it is.

This goes beyond satire to some other kind of enactment: its world is so hermetic it is in danger of bearing no relation to us, either. But it makes fascinating and engrossing theatre. Like the writing, I thought the production ever-so-slightly overdressed, but it’s performed and directed so well, with such accuracy, skill and commitment, that it’s well worth a look. It’s a brilliant exercise in style, if mostly notable for the possibilities it opens. Keep an eye out for this company.

Picture: Kristina Brew and Marissa Bennet in Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise.

Self Torture and Strenuous Exercise, by Harry Kondoleon, directed and designed by Ben Pfeiffer. With Marissa Bennett, Kristina Brew, Mick Lo Monaco and Josh Price. Artisan Collective, Guildford Lane Arts Gallery, Guildford Lane CBD, until March 13. Bookings: 0420 513 588.