Before this show, the writer asked that I be “brutal” in my review. She was joking. Receiving an unfavourable review is equivalent to being savaged by a sponge. But, more to the point, a review that does not shy away from the supposedly honest but harsh truth is usually one written by someone with only a passing acquaintance with Truth. (My fleeting impressions are hardly handed down from heaven, especially in a world where fewer and fewer of us believe there’s a heaven from which they could be handed.)
As you can see, the meta route is available to us all, playwrights and reviewers both, and I suspect it will always leave some audiences dissatisfied. (If two footballers must stop playing in order to argue the rules, the least they could do, for our entertainment, is decide their differences with their fists.)
But Cate Fucking Blanchett by Karolina Ristevski is a piece of meta-theatricality that does satisfy; it’s extremely funny and enormously clever, a teasing invitation to consider the nature of theatre itself.
One of the characters is a writer. She has written a play about her family, and they argue about whether they are an appropriate source for her inspiration. And, in that play she has written about her family, they argue about the very same thing.
Meta-theatricality is a dangerous game; play that card and have you thrown away your chance to evoke empathy? Perhaps. Sometimes the wisest thing is to push on, which is what this piece does, allowing a play within a play to become another play within another play. (Analogy: You see your partner in the act of applying lipstick. This might make her beauty appear a façade, or it could be an erotically charged moment. Does Performance hide Truth? Does it reveal Truth? Or is it the only Truth?)
In addition to the meta-theatricality, another element of this magnificently rich script is the plotline in which the writer donates eggs to her sister so she can have another child. I give you something; you develop it; it’s no longer mine – an allegory of the creative process.
The play is beautifully directed by Ristevski herself. And her cast is absolutely terrific. Melissa Jones, Lana Morgan and Angela Johnston as the three sisters offer performances of comic brilliance. John Michael Narres give an exceptional turn as a fast talking doctor (and as a fast talking actor playing a fast talking doctor …. you get the drift.) As the writer observing the play being performed, both Kate Bookallil and Josie Waller deliciously capture the inevitable tension between the creative dream and the stage reality. And Siobhan Lawless’ cameo as chairperson in the mock Q and A post-show is played with a wonderfully deliberate obtuseness to the absurd.
And what about Cate? She wasn’t present on the night I attended. But there were several hilarious imitations. (Jones’ shot was glorious; gorgeously balanced between replication and parody, perfectly suiting the production’s goal.)
So why is Cate referred to at all? She is to play one of the sisters if (when?) the play (within a play…) is picked up by a major company. It’s a divine conceit; a reminder that despite all our talk of Truth within theatre, the subtext is often the pursuit of Fame.
Paul Gilchrist
Cate Fucking Blanchett by Karolina Ristevski
At Flight Path Theatre as part of the Sydney Fringe
Until 23 September
Theatre Red 