1989

Wogs Out of Work

Her Majesty’s Theatre,

January, 1989.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

Wogs Out of Work has been putting itself about for nearly four years now. Two separate companies with numerous cast reincarnations have presented more than 1,250 performances to an estimated 650,000 paying customers. Many of those people had never been to theatre in their lives and the bemused actors, most of them playing to their ethnic communities for the first time, expressed pride in the warmth of the response and occasional consternation with the task of performing to an audience oblivious to theatrical protocol.

Created in Melbourne by Simon Palomares, Nick Giannopoulos and Maria Portesi , Wogs Out of Work has been a show business phenomenon. From the comedy cabaret subculture it became a mainstream hit around the country- a show whose moment had arrived, a chip off the old zeitgeist. But topicality has a use-by date and Wogs’ has now expired. The time has come to say that its time has gone. Wogs Out of Work is definitely an ex-parrot.

In town for one last spin of the turnstiles, the production is bowing out anyway. It is a pity that it wasn’t a fraction sooner- before its vitality became dishevelled and its accessibility, pandering. The show was always on a fine line and in the less than eighteen months since it last played here, the balances have gone.

A lot has happened in that time, most of it on television. Last year, as programmers fumbled desperately for a cure for the dreaded ratings dropsy, laughter proved to be powerful medicine- especially if it was the local variety. The Comedy Company rescued Ten from the attack of the killer game shows and along with  Seven’s Fast Forward and the Big Gig on Two consolidated an audience for revue comedy of huge proportions.

In order to meet such ravenous demand the cabaret scene openly cannabilised itself. Within twelve weeks there wasn’t a trade secret left in comedy, every joke, every visual gag rehearsed and refined over five years had been fed into the cruel maw of television -including the best of Wogs Out of Work. The material for the show, a canny mix of ethnic pride and and populist burlesque, has been recycled as Con the Fruiterer, along with Marike, Roula, Toula, Soula and the Little Gentlemens. Having then been spun out, spun off and generally done to death by series television it     reappears in that  elephants’ graveyard for any  good idea, advertising.

With Palomares and Giannopoulos negotiating a second series of Acropolis Now, Wogs Out of Work has been left to circulate like space junk, once state-of-the -art now a superseded model. For the Adelaide season the mix of second generation cast members Roberto Micale and Michael Blair along with originator Maria Portesi was a raggedy one. Director Marc Gracie’s shadings have gone since Palomares, Giannopoulos and Mary Coustas first brought the show to the Space early last year. Coarser, politically more ambiguous, the show flounders without a tide of audience adulation.

Ironically Michael Blair’s opening monologue as Gordon, street-sweeper and audience barometer is stronger and shrewder than Giannopoulos’s and his skit as the Yugoslav busker was the highpoint of the show, taking the outlines of Palomares’ writing and extruding accomplished physical comedy into complex absurdist theatre. Micale is less accomplished and battling with weaker material -Spiro the surfer and Anthony Saxon MP, minister for tokenism- he lost his way and ours, reminding us, fatally, that Wogs depends on the same kind of momentum as sketch television.

Maria Portesi’s first appearance as Sheryl- cruelly reduced to a caricature of  sequins and  cretinous, upwardly inflected sentences- is breath-taking but this surreal, non-verbal comedy has not been sufficiently incorporated into the otherwise conventional revue format and ends up richocheting off the walls, like everything else Portesi did all night. Corpsing fellow actors, sending props flying, losing cues, moving manically around the stage, it seemed like theatrical self-mutilation- covert sabotage yearning for full-scale demolition.

It wasn’t fun to watch, especially since The Wogs in Space sketch, a  film parody depicting a reception band turning to prosciutto addiction, tiresome and over-long the first time round has now become completely unbearable to contemplate. Regrettably, the vignette of Libby, the prattling little schoolgirl on a swing, guilelessly revealing family prejudices- the highpoint of Mary Coustas’work -was deleted altogether, leaving only the dialogue between Blair and Micale as two middle-aged migrant women in a grapefruit-polishing factory, to carry some of the show’s previous political edge.

It is not a crime, or a surprise that Wogs Out of Work has dropped its bundle. It doesn’t alter its significance or its achievement. All the same it is a pity that its talented creators didn’t choose voluntary retirement rather than waiting  for retrenchment.

“Community Announcement” The Adelaide Review, No.60, February, 1989, p.27.