MKA: Theatre of New Writing, Producers Bar, 5-16 March 2013. Written and performed by Mark Wilson.
Mark
Wilson’s gender-bending solo performance in which he plays an actress of the
same name is an all-out assault on good taste which culminates in an extended
scene of anal intercourse with a microphone. That it is also about Shakespeare
– its title is drawn from Macbeth –
both surprises and, up to a point, sets it apart from other exercises in
offense of the John Waters variety.
UnSex
Me opens familiarly enough: a self-obsessed starlet is holding court on a
TV chat show. The actor in question is one Mark Wilson, winner of an Academy
Award. She is being directed in a stage production of Macbeth by her father, a somewhat alarming Roman Polanski-esque
figure who looms large over the play, and Mark’s fractured psyche. This
reviewer was drawn into the actress' bizarre world about fifteen minutes in,
victim of the dreaded audience interaction, to temporarily assume the role of
Mark’s sometimes lover, Guy. I have never kissed a man on the mouth before –
much less one with a beard – but UnSex Me
is that kind of show. You have been warned.
What makes it work, and enables it
to occasionally rise above its overwhelming schlockiness and almost complete
lack of restraint, is Wilson's impassioned performance. He believes in what he
has written and, despite moments of almost excruciating self-indulgence, Mark
the actress emerges as a genuine character, if not quite deserving of our sympathy
then at least dramatically compelling. It is a script with too much in it, but
its engagement with issues of gender and its presentations, with celebrity and
its excesses, and with Macbeth and
its possible interpretations in a post-Freudian, post-feminist world is
unexpectedly thought-provoking.
David
Finnigan’s 22 Short Plays, the second
in MKA’s three performance pop-up theatre, is a surreal comedy of sketches,
part-Monty Python, part-Noel Fielding
in its studied wackiness. The kids might call it ‘so random’. It is a show
which taps into the same zeitgeist as Adelaide’s own Golden Phung who, like
Finnigan, make theatre which borrows heavily from TV sources and is
refreshingly unencumbered by any of comedy’s golden rules. The punch line is
the first victim.
Each short play is prefaced by a
pre-recorded announcement of its title, all bizarre and funny. To give just a
little of the show’s flavour, one sketch is called ‘Cum Goblin’, and is a sort
of parody of a 19th century romantic novel in which two men debate
the unusual nickname of the title being applied to one of their lovers. Another
sketch – ‘Slave Market at the Top of a Ski Lift’ – is absurd comedy par
excellence, meaninglessly mashing up historical epochs and literary tropes to
hilarious effect. This is comedy with
no real targets, taking aim only at tired genre conventions and, perhaps, the
contemporary attention span which, in the age of YouTube, seems to demand more
and more in less and less time.
The three performers – Tom Dent,
Conor Gallacher and Kerith Manderson-Galvin – impress with their gusto, comic
flair and, it must be said, persistence in the extreme heat of the pop-up
theatre’s beer garden setting. As with all sketch-based comedy, 22 Short Plays is a hit and miss affair,
but Dent, Gallacher and Manderson-Galvin – under the incisive direction of the
latter’s brother and MKA Creative Director, Tobias – are unstinting in their
commitment to the silliness; no mean feat under lights in 35 plus-degree
temperatures.
‘There
is always soma’, wrote Aldous Huxley in Brave
New World, ‘delicious soma, half a gram for a half-holiday, a gram for a
week-end, two grams for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity
on the moon...’
Huxley’s
superdrug is given a radical reinterpretation in Tobias Manderson-Galvin’s one
man show of the same name. Ostensibly playing himself – he comes across as a
sort of recovering-from-something, or having-just-escaped-from-somewhere
stand-up comic at the end of a very long run of shows – Manderson-Galvin
effectively drags soma from the eighty-year-old pages of Huxley’s dystopia into
the 21st century: hypertension, TV evangelists, digital democracy.
Like both Unsex Me and 22 Short Plays, Soma dabbles in audience interaction, in perversity and
subversiveness, in violently pushing against theatrical boundaries. It is the
most self-indulgent of the three plays, but in Manderson-Galvin’s almost stream
of consciousness-style script there is more than a hint of commentary on the
various cults of personality which dominate today’s airwaves. He likes to say
his own name – a mouthful for anybody – and he likes to change his clothes, at
one point stripping entirely, at others switching between shirts and suits for
no discernible reason. Elsewhere, we are introduced to a heavily-bandaged teddy
bear and his keyboard, and Manderson-Galvin attempts to crowd surf with a
boogie board. Has he taken soma, or have we?
SOMA is, if
you have not by now guessed, a show difficult to get a handle on. Many, I
suspect, will dismiss it as narcissistic art student wank. It is, certainly,
the least accessible of the three plays reviewed here. Happily, what it does
share with MKA’s other work is an almost vicious refusal to permit its audience
to become bored. Again, here, I think it’s possible to detect a certain amount
of satire at play, a thread of criticism of the desire of modern audiences to
be entertained at any cost. This, after all, was Huxley’s point: that an
Orwellian controlling authority is not needed to enslave a populace. Give them
escape – TV, sex, drugs – and they will enslave themselves.
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