M.Rock

Valerie Bader and Clementine Mills. Image by Lisa Tomasetti. 

Tracey is an 18 year-old party girl, detouring off the road to adulthood into endless nights of clubs and parties. When Tracey is swallowed by the seductive Berlin club scene, her 70 year-old grandmother Mabel sets off to retrieve her. But once Mabel sets foot into Tracey’s world, she finds that she has more in common with Tracey than she expected.

Lachlan Pilpott’s play is inspiring in the most unexpected ways. Rather than tackling the generation gap by focusing on the wisdom of age, he instead reminds us of the value of youth. Mercifully, this is something you could take your 15 year-old kid to see without them feeling like they’re getting a lecture on the tribulations of parenthood – in fact, you’d be the one getting a lecture on the tribulations of adolescence.

Watching the dynamics between three generations of women unfold on stage, an Oscar Wilde quote springs to mind:

‘The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, the young know everything.’

It’s not just that the quote is thematically relevant – it’s also because there is something Wilde-ian about the whimsically witty, sarcastically sentimental playwriting itself. It’s no small task to sustain energy throughout a 90 minute production with no interval. If I wanted to nitpick, I could say it would have been tighter if it were just a smidge shorter, but I’m sure the majority of the enthralled audience on opening night would disagree with me. They just couldn’t get enough Mabel.

Clementine Mills is an energetic Tracey, and it’s impossible not to love Valerie Bader as Mabel. However, it was Joshua Brennan, Madeline Jones and Brandon McClelland in the chorus who never let the pace drop. Switching between a multitude of characters, costumes and accents at breakneck speed, this is sketch comedy at it’s best. Pastiche paired with traditional narrative is yet another way of bridging the generation gap, ensuring there really is something here that will resonate with everyone.

The creators have wisely refrained from going nuts on production design and lighting in the club scenes, ensuring that the focus always remains on the story and performers. The design is fitting, but never dominates the scene. I applaud the decision to bring a live DJ, Jonny Seymour (Stereogamous) onstage – the God-like presence of a DJ onstage does more to set the mood of club world than any amount of lasers and lightshows could. His music is good – tonally appropriate, but never hogging the limelight. Well, maybe just once, during the Sound of Music number!

This is an appropriately timed story. The people who pioneered rave culture are now of child-rearing age, and it’s the first time in history there has been an older generation who have first hand experience with rave culture specifically. Mabel is from a generation that missed out on that culture, and that is why her story resonates so strongly with youth: this is not a rediscovery for her – it’s a whole new adventure. The link between the disempowerment of the elderly and the disempowerment of the youth is rarely made at all, and never with such clarity. People have called this production a ‘coming-of-age’ story, but I think clichés like this really do a disservice to the whole point of M.Rock. It’s more appropriately dubbed a ‘coming-of-youth’ tale.