This evening of two short plays is part of the Everything But The Kitchen Sink Festival.
The first show, Dazza, written and performed by Frankie Fearce, is seriously top class satire. It’s a beautiful, measured criticism of the parochial Australian male, focusing especially on his attitudes to gender identity. “You’re one of those pronoun people, aren’t ya?” Dazza says to an unexpected visitor to his local. Fearce’s writing is wonderfully sharp, and the rhythms of the vernacular are spot on.
Like all top rate satire, there’s little hyperbole, just a commitment to truth. Garden variety satire criticises. Great satire portrays. If the artist tells us the character is flawed we might choose to read it all as a comment about the artist themselves. However, if it’s we who decide the character is flawed, the criticism appears indubitable.
The beauty of the portrait is that Dazza refuses to consider that he might be closed-minded, which is, of course, the epitome of closed-mindedness. Dazza is a good bloke in a world that’s certain he is one, and that’s the very problem.
The change from the introductory scene where Fearce plays themselves (I guess) to where they play Dazza is a piece of theatrical magic. It was also a feast for thought: the change in the audience was utterly electrifying. We had been witnessing a person give testimony of their lived experience and the vibe was definitely supportive. Then came the change, and suddenly we were confronted with the delicious, dangerous lie that is fiction and, in addition to abundant laughter, there was a shifting in seats, an intake of breathe, a palpable uncertainty. It was as though we had been in a church and now we were in a theatre. The experience clarified for me why I prefer performance to personal testimony: when someone genuinely shares, only a dickhead (such as Dazza) is not supportive; when someone performs we feel little moral necessity to respond to the character in any fixed way, and so it is we who are encouraged to be genuine.
The second show of the evening is Horse Play. It’s a clever title for a clever show. Zoe Tomaras directs a fun sitcom, devised and written by the team (Nat Knowles, Sophea Op, Angela Johnston, Linda Chong, Georgia Drewe and Tomaras.) Five soldiers (men, of course) wait inside the Trojan horse. Sometime in the night they will slip out and open the city gates … and the rest is known. (And told in its full horror by Euripides in his The Women of Troy.)
In this tale, the men just wait. It’s Waiting for Godot in togas. (Ok, not togas, but you get the point.) It’s a wonderful set up which the team doesn’t so much use to discuss war as masculinity. The very gifted comic cast present the male characters as being unable to transcend the puerility of teenagers (a criticism which dovetails well with who is often left to do the fighting of wars.) There are dick and masturbation jokes aplenty and homosexual curiosity masquerades unconvincingly as homophobia. There’s also a playful exploration of how we attempt to fill time until the big moment, whatever that big moment might be (which is the family connection to Godot.) To portray characters who are bored is always risky, but Tomaras deals with it astutely. The piece is not presented in real time but is offered in multiple brief scenes, moreish slices of experience, cute skits cut and served to us by the dimming and raising of lights, a directorial choice which functions as an effective laugh track.
If I’ve made it all seem merely wacky fun, the concluding scene of Horse Play throws down the gauntlet. It powerfully reminds us that those we find most laughable might be just that because of the infantilizing impact of the trauma that they face, and that we ignore. Euripides followed a tragedy with satyr; here we have something that poignantly approximates the reverse.
These two short shows exhibit the inspiring wildness that makes the Everything but the Kitchen Sink Festival a terrific addition to the Sydney theatre scene.
Paul Gilchrist
Dazza by Frankie Fearce
Horse Play by Nat Knowles, Sophea Op, Angela Johnston, Linda Chong, Georgia Drewe and Zoe Tomaras
Part of the Everything But The Kitchen Sink Festival at Flight Path Theatre until Nov 4
Images by Toby Blome
Theatre Red 
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