Neandellus: Theatre: Melbourne

The History Operation
written by Tim Wotherspoon, directed by Erin Kelly, performed by Tim Wotherspoon, Katy Warner, Peter Berzanskis
Lithuanian Club
23 Sept-8 Oct

Do you find anything bizarre about my way of speaking? Not the voice I mean but the words. I use none but the simplest words I hope, yet I sometimes find my way of speaking bizarre.
All that Fall, Beckett

I’ve now seen three Wotherspoon/Warner productions, including These Are the Isolates which won best new play (or some such thing) at last year’s Fringe, and regardless of who they’ve brought in to direct (in this case Erin Kelly), or which of them has written the piece (this time Wotherspoon, last time Warner, time before that Wotherspoon), or who else they’ve got with them on stage (Peter Berzanskis is also in this one), there has been, I think, a certin consistency of mood between all three of their pieces, an enigmatic quality which, when everything comes together, seems beautifully obscure, and when it doesn’t seems frustratingly wilful.

I’ll skip over the frustrating parts, mostly because I’ve talked about them before, and others have talked about them before, and there comes a point where you have to just accept that, well, this is the way they’ve decided they want to work, and you might as well try and look past it and see what else might be going on.

What I find interesting in their work is the linguistic self-consciousness and the way that underlines the deliberately literary and un-natural quality of their scenarios. The language they speak seems like a dead language, one which is staked through with formalisms and dislocated with unlikely constructions.  A language, in other words, which died a violent death. The struggle to get this dead weight up and about, to make it expressive, has great universal appeal, for all language, not only stage lanuage, is dying, and it is part of our condition that we wrestle with its heavy torso and unresponsive limbs our whole life, it is, to quote Beckett, “unspeakably excruciating”.

after all this
devised and performed by Elbow Room
Dear Patti Smith Gallery
27 Sept – 1 Oct

This is fairly miraculous stuff, if that construction doesn’t obliterate the meaning of miraculous, and it deserves a much more comprehensive review that what I can offer right now.

A while back, I was talking with Jana P. about “rigorous theatre”, and I recall being somewhat dismissive when she suggested that Elbow Room were “rigorous” – which was not meant necessarily as a complaint, I just hadn’t drawn the line between some of their more-or-less whimsical inventions and let’s say the kind of strict, point-vice arrangements I would normally describe as “rigorous”. Well, I was wrong: they do make rigorous theatre, and this example is mink tight.

Through three stages, or scenes, after all this dramatises the tendency in Western Culture to imagine an afterlife. Specifically, this play looks at the psychological “uses” of our belief in the hereafter. Stage by stage, the audience ascend through a multi-levelled gallery space – white walls, bare floors, sparsely lit – on the one hand literally tracking the notion of a soul rising from the earth, while the performances themselves follow the progressive intellectual rarefaction of salvation, where it begins with a pre-modern (or at least childlike) hope of seeing loved ones again, through ideas of reward for altruism, especially as such ideas are impacted by mathematical Darwinism, to post-modern millennial re-interpretations of the dualist distinction between body and soul.

Through all of this the performance is never essayistic, even where tackling difficult subjects like theoretical biology. It also shows off a super intelligent wit. For example, Angus Grant and Emily Tomlins, playing a pair of child siblings, begin the evening with a game of shadow puppets under their donna. Apart from being rather cute to see two adults in their peejays and the rest, these opening seconds don’t only cast us back into “Angus” and “Emily’s” infancy, but also philosophical infancy, back, that is, into Plato’s Cave of Shadows and the idea of platonic dualism, the philosophical font of modern Christian theology. The whole piece is littered with similarly clever asides and details that enrich the ideas at play (Up & Go? – genius!).

Jane Austen Is Dead … See You at the Wake
written devised and performed by Letita Sutherland and Mel Dodge
Gertrudes Brown Couch, Fitzroy
21 Sept-9 Oct

This is actually a double bill of two mostly unrelated pieces, although the titles go together beautifully.

The first is a monologue on dating and Jane Austen. Our hostess is single, still, and apparently it’s all Austen’s fault. Over a gentle half an hour of fairly frothy reminiscences we learn that, with her Darcys, Wentworths, Knightlys and that guy from Mansfield Park, Austen simply set the bar too high. In the real world, we’re told, men are a sad bunch of Bingleys and Willoughbys. It is possible, though I probably put myself in with Tom Betrand from Mansfield Park, what with the interest in theatre and the enormous debts. Still, he’s no Darcy, that’s for sure.

What we see then is a process of disillusionment, as the scales are removed and Austen’s influence is disentangled from real life expectations. I guess I might have preferred some insight into the original entanglement, into how Austen came to figure so significantly in the first place, because that’s something I’ve never really understood: the full Austen thing. Not the greatness of her writing, which is given, but the personal investment some folk have in the fantasy of Austen.

The conclusion is that what Austen wrote, really, are fairy tales. It’s a solid conclusion, with fine critical pedigree – it was Nabokov’s estimation too – and neatly rounds out performance that sits on that largely illusory line between standup and theatre.

See You at the Wake is a more ambitious and more theatrical work, and less successful for it, which is so often the reward for ambition. Dave is dead and we’re invited to the wake. Dave lived on the street and was estranged from his family. Those appearing at his wake include family members who don’t remember him, street kids who are grateful to him, ne’erdowells who are there for the booze, Centrelink officers who don’t care and an officious funeral director, all played by Dodge and Sutherland. The characters are a lively bunch, but the comedy is often too fussy and overworked, while the processional is rather ramshackle.