Love Monkey

Love Monkey
John Paul Hussey
At the Northcote Town Hall
Until June 15

I don’t know if it’s important or not but I never saw either Chocolate Monkey or Spacemunki. It’s just how it is really, either you’ve got a show on or you’re recovering from too many shows, and you just can’t make it to see everything so you sometimes miss the big thing of the moment cause you can’t be arsed to go. You’ll catch the remount, you think, and then never do. Besides, not to put too fine a point on it, despite the publicity, Danny had not heard overwhelmingly spectacular things about either show.

Hence, with a due sense of foreboding, we sat front row at the Northcote Town Hall for the third in John Paul Hussey’s simian trilogy, Love Monkey. The twittering hip people behind us smugly demonstrating in a slightly too loud voice designed to be overheard that “Oh, JP will probably pick on me for some kind of audience participation” did nothing to improve my expectations.

I must say though that “with lowered expectations” is Danny’s favorite way to go into a show. Invariably these turn out to be the best experiences and Love Monkey was not the disproving exception. It’s been an unfantastic run of shows for the last couple of months, hence Danny’s reluctance to review, but the universe threw us a bone and Love Monkey was it.

Regardless of how you feel about monodrama you’ve got to give it up for a guy who can memorise an hour and a half’s text solo. Clever, though not overly clever, use of props and set sit Love Monkey just on the edge of that “Magical Theatre” experience that’s so popular at the moment because we can’t stand to look ourselves in the face and prefer to dance around with vacuum cleaners and the soundscape Hussey’s rant is set to is, in Danny’s opinion, one of Kelly Ryall’s best so far. One hesitates to call Hussey’s characters loveable because you get the feeling that JP isn’t the sort you want to meet in a darkened bar where you can’t see what he’s putting in your drink but there is an undeniably endearing quality to them which, when layered in with Ryall’s world of sound, some slightly less than inspiring digital projection and some cute observations about life makes for an entirely watchable show.

The sign of a great night in the theatre is so often not noticing every agonizing second slouch by and an hour and a half passes in Hussey and co’s company leaving you to bop out into the night whistling Supertramp (and thank god for Supertramp by the way).

The question Love Monkey leaves you with, of course, is which are you? Danny says Intense Dionysian Hobbit.

Danny Episode

Rio Saki and Other Falling Debris

Rio Saki and Other Falling Debris
By Shaun Charles
At The Carlton Courthouse
Until June 21

Where to start? Should I start with a positive? No? Well, let’s start with the writing then.

Firstly, Shaun Charles demonstrates a remarkably tin ear for dialogue some how managing to capture what people would say in a given situation and then torturing it into a rigid parody of actually human speech. Secondly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a narrative in which so little happens that is so heavily contrived. This characters girlfriend leaves him and goes and hooks up with that characters sister while that character ends up in a bar with the best friend of the first character, as interesting as a merry go round in Geelong.

By the way, incase the plays constant unvaried repetition of this single fact doesn’t clue you in; Rio Saki was known as the Artist of Love.

Directorially the play staggers along without too much intervention though the odd bit of slow mo walking at the back of the stage, occasional significance heavy blocking and an awful lot of unprompted and detached screaming

Detached is, in fact, an excellent word for the performance being given by the six actors involved. Not that they can be blamed. At some point in the rehearsal process ol’ Doc Episode himself would have mentally stepped out for a fag and never come back if he was acting in it. There’s just so little to hang your hat on emotionally. Which is contextually not surprising as the stakes are set impossibly high from the very beginning. It’s not giving anything away to tell you now that Rio Saki is set in a world fated to be destroyed by a meteor strike in four days. Consequently, as an audience member, it’s a little hard to care about the emotional ups and downs of these people on stage as we know that less than a week’s time will see them all ashes floating in space.

The design of the set is quite pretty in that post apocalyptic way but once you’ve taken that in you’re left with nothing to do but wait for the asteroid to hit and wipe us all out.


Danny Episode