Opening La Mama’s Celebrating Women season is Closed For Maintenance, a three-dimensional, cluttered love-letter to the theatre that has loomed so very tall in Melbourne’s fringe performance imagination for nearly fifty years.
Closed For Maintenance describes itself variously as an ‘experiment in theatrical design’ and ‘a visual and sensory experience’, but really (kick me if I’m committing an taxonomical faux-pazz here) it’s live art, pure and simple. We, the unsuspecting audience, have accidentally arrived and have our tickets checked on a day when La Mama is closed for maintenance; but if we hang around, we might see something. Or, to be more accurate, if we hoon round the block to the back door, don a disposable hooded labcoat and safety goggles, and squeeze into two square metres of La Mama’s sheet-covered interior.
While there are some works that enjoy costuming their audience just for the sake of immersion, I suspected strongly from the care with which they are dispensed that these disposable labcoats are, in some sense, Chekov’s disposable labcoats. Suffice to say I am not wrong. Do not wear your Prada, and take the offer of the La Mama strong-box for your bag.
The sheets quickly come down inside La Mama to reveal a remarkably intricate set. Every inch of the walls and a scaffold in the centre of the theatre are covered in ephemera, junk, tat, puppets, curtains, vegetation and miniature sets balanced on record players. The La Mama ‘Caretaker’ (Chris Molyneux) provides most of the theatre: speaking entirely in the names of La Mama plays past, he carries out a full hour’s wortha of thoroughly varied and entertainingly inscrutable La-Mama-themed (and otherwise) interactions with the audience and set. There is flour, food colouring, disco balls, answering machine messages, puppets, crank-handled music boxes, raffle tickets, smoke, foam, a disembodied party dress, recycled bottles from the restaurant next door, hilarious overhead projector doodling, fire and bubbles. Basically, there’s quite a lot of fun on offer.
Despite this ringing endorsement of its total lack of boredom, Closed For Maintenance is not without its problems. The La Mama space is small, and when full of exciting tat, it is even smaller. The central scaffold leaves the audience rubbing shoulders around the outside, not quite knowing where to look next, generally getting in each other’s way and in the way of the performances, while trying not touch anything or knock anything over. The puppetry is underwhelming (or at least the parts I see when I happen to be looking that way), and many of the set-pieces have clearly been included because someone has thought them up, rather than because they contribute in any way to the narrative, such as it is, leaving a faint taste of copy-pasted ideas. (I also find it nearly impossible not to compare Closed For Maintenance to Daniel Santangeli’s Wheyface – a piece with a very similar format, but altogether more polished execution.)
This is a work with three or four moments of total brilliance, a few problems and a large amount of happy bewilderment.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Closed For Maintenance
Conceived, designed and created by Bronwyn Pringle, Melanie Liertz, Lisa Mibus, Jack Beeby, Pippa Bainbridge and Jessica Smithett
Performers include Chris Molyneux
Additional sound by Russell Goldsmith
Additional puppets by Sayraphim Lothian
Image by Kylie Mibus
La Mama Theatre, Faraday St, Carlton
www.lamama.com.au
10 – 13 July
