Short and sweet.
The Beckett was set up in traverse, and combined with the brightness of the lights, the effect was to make the audience - well, me at least ... in the front row for the second time this season - feel thoroughly complicit in the lack of understanding or awareness displayed by the artist (Nicola Gunn) as she talks blithely about her project-in-residency in a public housing complex without any regard for the needs or existing community of its residents, an effect exacerbated by the knowledge that at least one member of the cast themselves lives in public housing in Victoria (performed on a rotating basis, and playing a resident - reading from a script - who is engaged on a considerably less high-brow community art project of their own in the form of a tiled mosaic bench).
And the complicity extends to the realisation that she - the artist - is in fact a stalking horse for a corporate plan to redevelop the estate to the detriment of its residents, her art intended to serve as an advertisement for the redevelopment to attract private investors and occupants. The play generates plenty of laughs, but also an underlying, niggling discomfort which is entirely intended and apt.
The Beckett was set up in traverse, and combined with the brightness of the lights, the effect was to make the audience - well, me at least ... in the front row for the second time this season - feel thoroughly complicit in the lack of understanding or awareness displayed by the artist (Nicola Gunn) as she talks blithely about her project-in-residency in a public housing complex without any regard for the needs or existing community of its residents, an effect exacerbated by the knowledge that at least one member of the cast themselves lives in public housing in Victoria (performed on a rotating basis, and playing a resident - reading from a script - who is engaged on a considerably less high-brow community art project of their own in the form of a tiled mosaic bench).
And the complicity extends to the realisation that she - the artist - is in fact a stalking horse for a corporate plan to redevelop the estate to the detriment of its residents, her art intended to serve as an advertisement for the redevelopment to attract private investors and occupants. The play generates plenty of laughs, but also an underlying, niggling discomfort which is entirely intended and apt.
