‘How shall I kill thee? Let me count the ways.’
Presented by Erth, the marvellous company that has previously staged I, Bunyip and Dinosaur Petting Zoo, this violent puppet show show is definitely not for children. Very strange, very dark, it’s a bizarre Surrealist nightmare, a confronting but engaging rhapsody on death.
Employing songs by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds songs as a foundation, the production asks: are we really more ‘civilised’ than our ancestors who packed the Coliseum in ancient Rome? Or the crowds at medieval public executions? Given our own current media’s hyping of serial killers via popular ‘real crime’ TV series, how far has our society progressed from those periods where thousands were killed annually in the name of entertainment?
Violent computer games, Ivan Milat, and the Strathfield murders are referenced in Murder, and the distinction between illusion and reality is deliberately blurred. Do we accept and allow what is depicted in computer games because we know it is a ‘game’ and not real, the production seems to ask? The work also features some graphic, troubling sex scenes that lead to yet more deaths; women are shown as objects to be raped, bashed, tortured and killed as all the while the men in their lives protest their ‘love’. Another scene depicts a mother sadly and lovingly smothering her very ill child.
The main villain is a puppet character called Stagger Lee, as in the song. Erth present him as an amoral mobster dressed in a red coat and fedora with an artificial, oversized grin. (At one point he is represented by just a grinning set of teeth.)
Erth’s puppetry, with the use of the Japanese-style ‘koken’ (puppeteers who are fully visible to the audience but dressed in black in order to be ‘hidden’ from view) is sensational. In some parts the work is reminiscent of French master Philippe Genty. The puppets themselves range from small to life size and include a faceless small child and a voluptuous woman in a red dress, among others.
Our
excellent narrator, ‘real live’ actor Graeme Rhodes, is also
manipulated by the koken as if a puppet. He has some brilliant, chilling
monologues. Is Rhodes’ character as narrator also a murderer, hiding
bodies in suitcases under the bed? Are the scenes towards the end
featuring him talking to a small child actually him talking to his
younger, frightened self?
The set design, again by the Erth team, appears heavy and solid but is quite fluid and flexible. There is a fridge, a stove, a bed, a large table – all of which vanish, slide in and out and return. Rhodes has a spectacular entrance through the fridge. There are also floating panels that are used as projection screens. (Some of the red landscape photography is stunning and I also liked the forest drawings.) Flickering strobe lighting is used as well as dry ice ‘fog’.
The work’s astonishing puppetry, excellent live acting and computer effects were successfully blended in a rather over the top, Grand Guignol way, to shock and disturb any would–be complacent viewer with its confronting message. A macabre, challenging, and blistering indictment of our current society’s morals.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Murder
Erth
Inspired by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads
Concept and Direction: Scott Wright
Writer: Raimondo Cortese
Design: Steve Howarth and the Erth team
Sound and Lighting: Phil Downing
Choreography: Kate Champion (courtesy Force Majeure)
Puppetry Director: Rod Primrose
Lighting Consultant: Neil Simpson
Performers: Graeme Rhodes, Rod Primrose, Michelle Robin Anderson, Gavin Clarke and Katina Olsen
Musicians: Eileen Hodgkins, Chas Glover, Ivan Jordan and Phil Downing
The Reginald, Seymour Centre
5 – 19 January
Sydney Festival 2013
www.sydneyfestival.org
5 – 27 January
