Cabaret artist Tomas Ford sounds more subversive than he is. His program notes say he is cursed/blessed with a voice suited to cabaret, as though he would rather be singing punk all the time. In The Final Chase, presented at Perth Independent Theatre Festival, the award-winning Ford explores tropes from hard-boiled detective fiction and spy films to accompany his own electronic music and songs.
Ford has great comic timing and the 100+ audience love the interactivity – he gets women up dancing and falling into his arms; he climbs over seats; he strokes thighs during a seduction song. His intense energy and possession of the space takes the audience along with him. His verve goes a long way in this Final Chase and the comedic, deadpan delivery hit the spot with this audience.
The singing unfortunately was often flat, and occasionally distorted or shouty. Ongoing mic problems did not help here, though it felt like some of this may have been intentional, as electronic music can include bad distortion and mic feedback as par for the course. Otherwise Ford’s voice is magnetic, easily managing the highs and lows, and the songs have lots of hooks that generate plenty of toe-tapping.
Ford’s forte is the ability to create a disco dance floor vibe in a plain studio theatre with not much more than some flashing lights, his box of musical tricks, his ability to rev up the audience, and of course some red mood lighting. The notion of writing an anti-hero James Bond’s super-cool hero does not eventuate – I count three dead women (all emotionally connected to our sort-of ASIO spy) and more than two handfuls of dead security men (but we had no emotional connection with them) and lots of hangovers, big Thai drug dealers to chase down, and calling in of contacts. Doesn’t sound so different to most of the other James Bond or spy movies going around.
As a sole performer Tomas Ford uses lighting, sound, minimal props (the Bond drinks table is a big feature) and a stream of video projections. Though repetitive, they do work as a kind of soporific TV background and you can almost smell the Pulp Fiction references. The best of these videos was the fascinating montage of Ford’s intense gaze intercut and superimposed over itself so that hair became eyebrow became chin (x 3) with the deconstruction of facial images reminiscent of layers of identity re-forming. This was mesmerizing, and somehow spoke more to me about the themes of the show rather than Ford’s trying too hard to be this traumatised spy character.
Rating: ​3.5 stars out of 5
The Final Chase
Presented by Perth Theatre Trust, Subiaco Arts Centre and Tom S Ford Captain of Industry
Performed and written by Tomas Ford
Songs, arrangements and video by Tomas Ford
On-screen appearances by Ayden Doherty, Zoe McNeil and Ze!
The Studio, Subiaco Arts Centre
Perth Independent Theatre Festival 2015
10–13 June
