A Flock of Flamin’ Galahs
Troupe Theatre
Centralia Hotel

Despite their “extensive and detailed” research into the life and times of five Australian eccentrics, Troupe have not managed to gather any semblance of unity or purpose into A Flock of Flamin‘ Galahs, their Festival show at the Centralia Hotel on North Terrace.

They seem to hope that a collection of tableaux, some hoary old audience participation numbers and an over-long serve of inferior G-and-S will charm audiences enough to overlook what a waste of time and talent their show really is.

For a start their interpretation of the word ‘eccentric’ is so eccentric as to be meaningless. I’m sure that Foucault’s work on deviance lurks somewhere under all this but the choice of subjects appears to be entirely arbitrary.

The only thing that Daisy O’Dwyer Bates, William Chidley, Mahomet Allum, Kate Leigh and Bea Miles have in common is that they have been incongruously linked in Bill Edwards’ travelling waxworks pub show.

Waxworks provide an unfortunate but apt metaphor for the inert theatre in Act One. With the aid of his stockwhip, Bill Edwards (played with courageous perseverance by Catherine Fitzgerald) leads the luckless audience promenading to various corners of the Centralia Hotel to where the historical figures in little booths suddenly wax wordy about herbal remedies, crime, Shakespeare, outback clothing and coition without erection. The performances are good but the format is so self-conscious it is like being locked in an elevator with someone who’s talking too much.

After straggling from one tableau to another while being exhorted to buy drinks, we are then told there is a twenty minute interval and exhorted to drink up more. Maybe that would have helped. Because when our eccentrics come back to the stage the sense of fragmentation is replaced by claustrophobia as each character does a musical or novelty turn with audience involvement which even the plants in the first night audience found discomforting.

After another lengthy interval the show reconvenes with Bill Edwards, now a Judge, for trial by operetta. Written by Gavan Strawhan, who has notched up quite a few successes with Troupe in the past, Act Three is like being pummelled by a rhyming dictionary. The purpose of the piece is to blow the whistle on our beloved eccentrics. Daisy Bates wore army boots, Chidley was a lunatic, Allum was a profiteer and so on.

With our sympathies in some confusion we then have, as the ultimate disclosure, the news that the Judge is “a man without a sword” (that rhymes with fraud) and that, we are told, means that she is a woman. Troupe are not expanding ideological frontiers with this sort of stuff. Nor with Irish jokes and other banter which they patronisingly offer as popular entertainment.

Although enthusiastic in a brainless kind of way, structurally and politically Troupe have done poorly. Luke Cutler’s costumes and designs look great and the music works well but there is little evidence of the directional skills of either Venetia Gillot or David Carlin and the considerable talents of actors such as Peter Wood, Jenny Castles, Andrew Donovan and Catherine Fitzgerald are wasted.

These have been beleagured times for Troupe, a company with a reputation for integrity and invention. All the more reason to regret that A Flock of Flamin’ Galahs is such an ex-parrot.

“Flighty” The Adelaide Review, No.49, March, 1988. P.31