An English language and no doubt otherwise-tweaked take by Australian playwright Tom Holloway on a free and indeed in many respects oppositional (according to the program) adaptation by Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt of Strindberg's original Dance of Death.
Felt like a Malthouse production, in a good way - traverse stage, fishbowl-enclosed behind perspex walls, blaring music and lights, kinetic use of stage and set (complete with roast chicken piece hurled to splatter against one of those walls), profanity galore, meta-scene announcing ('round 1: the battle before dinner'), &c. All deployed in service of this lacerating and extremely dry depiction of a 25-year marriage of mutual tearing away at each other; it did have hints of Beckett, with its trapped, grotesque figures going around in entropic, destructive circles. Not a play or production to fill its audience with optimism about the human condition, but skilfully, absorbingly done.
Jacek Koman as the husband (aka the narcoleptic Argentine in Moulin Rouge) and Belinda McClory (who has apparently been in everything including, most recently for me, Pompeii, LA) both great and believably horrible human beings; David Paterson as her cousin Kurt, whose arrival precipitates the latest round of blood-letting, also good.
(w/ Alice - amusingly, the name of the wife in the play - and Mehnaz)
Felt like a Malthouse production, in a good way - traverse stage, fishbowl-enclosed behind perspex walls, blaring music and lights, kinetic use of stage and set (complete with roast chicken piece hurled to splatter against one of those walls), profanity galore, meta-scene announcing ('round 1: the battle before dinner'), &c. All deployed in service of this lacerating and extremely dry depiction of a 25-year marriage of mutual tearing away at each other; it did have hints of Beckett, with its trapped, grotesque figures going around in entropic, destructive circles. Not a play or production to fill its audience with optimism about the human condition, but skilfully, absorbingly done.
Jacek Koman as the husband (aka the narcoleptic Argentine in Moulin Rouge) and Belinda McClory (who has apparently been in everything including, most recently for me, Pompeii, LA) both great and believably horrible human beings; David Paterson as her cousin Kurt, whose arrival precipitates the latest round of blood-letting, also good.
(w/ Alice - amusingly, the name of the wife in the play - and Mehnaz)
