In My Hyperbolic Opinion

"Decadence" by Steven Berkoff.
TAP Gallery, Sydney

The TAP Gallery, for those not versed in the independent theatre scene in Sydney, is a small theatre and art gallery in the trendy Darlinghurst area in the inner city. The gallery is spacious and a little bit funky. The theatre is tiny and a little bit hazardous (fire hazardous that is - long dark corridor to a small space full of electrical equipment with only one exit back down said corridor). But this is not the fault of the production in question. However what can undeniably be laid at the feet of Inner City Arts, who produced this abortion, is a show which matched a cast of actors with material much too big for them, terrible accents, atrocious use of Berkoff's rich language, and a near total lack of stylistic cohesion or storytelling.

Now I'm very willing and quick to encourage people with less experience or fledgling abilities to work hard and challenge themselves. But have a realistic sense of what is within your grasp. I'm not normally one to say anything actively nasty about an actor's ability, but just because you've done a million eistedfodds and spent years in private tuition doesn't mean you're necessarily any great talent or authority, just that a tutor was happy to take all that money off your hands. Two of the cast members were graduates of AADA, and I must admit they at least seemed to have some grasp of the theatrical, if a rudimentary one, and that's not taking into account the other major deficiencies of this production. The two males of the cast seemed to be suffering from some kind of neurological disorder for much of the play, their physicality completely dominating every aspect of their performance - possibly an attempt on their, or the director's part to complement the heightened language with heightened physicality - but the mistake there is that Berkoff's words do more than enough work in that department. Overt physicality just completely subverted the writer's linguistic ingenuity - like slapstick in a Noel Coward play.

With regards to the accents, I do have to insert the standard caveat that as an accent & dialect specialist I am overly sensitive to slip ups. However. These were not accents. They were abominations. Especially in the case of one female who, far from the Received Pronunciation she was attempting, appeared to be speaking a language all of her own. I couldn't discern whether her difficulty arose from English being a 2nd language (suggested by the "hip"-"heap"distinction being lost - Spanish? - and by the "cat" vowel being substituted for the "strut" vowel - Spanish or other Romance language possibilities) or from overcompensation from her own underlying dialect, such as American. Another possiblity which could account for the aforementioned phonetic discrepancies (the only consistent thing about the accent) was some kind of Asian language, owing to the rhythm. IN ANY CASE, I could barely understand th emajority of what she was saying. To her credit though, whether by accident or design (I'm inclined towards the former) she was the only actor who really engaged with Berkoff's dynamics and rhythms, and the only actor whose characterisation and physicality had any specificity - even if it was a little over the top (understatement).

Her scene partner very loudly mumbled his way through his lines, completely stripping the words of any story, while the other male was basically attempting an imitation of Berkoff himself (or perhaps Rain Man), while simultaneously trying unsuccessfully for the most part to erradicate his own distinctive speech patterns (sybillant /s/, nasality) - his outrageously overdone physicality also smacked of a desperate bid at overcompensation - a parody of machismo bereft of the threat the audience must percieve from that character. The other female was just all over the place vocally, a very general Cockney with startlingly Aussie sentences popping up. Her attitude was right, but damned if I could tell what she was on about.

Stylistically it leapt from attempted realism to surrealism to hyper-realism to absurdism from scene to scene, and occasionally from line to line. Certainly from actor to actor. Another way to put it could be that there were four actors in four different plays most of the time, and not one of them was telling any kind of story. A lot of the time I was completely lost as to the crux of the scene, and if there was plot (I'm sure there was) I couldn't see it, even from the glimmers which darted into view between the overly pregnant pauses and the hammy Mr Bean antics of the male actors. I couldn't help but hear my first-year acting teacher's old addage about "playing MOOD" - it is DOOM spelt backwards, and the general mood of this whole production certainly spelt doom for an entertaining night of theatre from the first few lines spoken on stage. What was lacking throughout was PURPOSE. Why are these characters here right now, and why is THIS the moment we are invited to watch? And WHY should we care or be interested?

And to add insult to injury, the show was two hours in length, with no interval. To be frank this can only display a lack of experience, or a lack of confidence. If the latter I could hardly blame them because I certainly would have left given any chance, but the space being such as it is, I was literally trapped in there wondering what would happen if a fire broke out in the gallery, and thinking about my car parked in a 1 hour zone, adamant that if I got a parking ticket, I was billing the company. Thankfully both parties were saved the trouble.

Upon reflection that's probably the harshest review I've ever written. But I stand by it. It really was one of the worst pieces of theatre I've been subjected to, rivalled only by "Desdemona" also in the TAP many years ago, and Lachlan Philpott's "Catapult" at the New Theatre, and "Whistle Down the Wind" in London. Honourable mention must go to Barrie Kosky's "King Lear" of about 10 years ago. I would have walked out if it hadn't been a school excursion.