2002

Shut Up and Love Me
Karen Finley
Union Hall, Adelaide University until 15 March.
Bookings FringeTIX 08 8201 4567. All tickets $36.
Brisbane and Sydney dates

Murray Bramwell

The Adelaide Fringe has been going gangbusters. Already a week ago, more tickets had been sold than 2000 – an increase of forty percent – and, running seven days after the truncated Adelaide Festival, that margin is likely to increase.
Especially with imaginative local work such as Fresh Track’s production of Reg Cribb’s play The Return directed by Geordie Brookman, and this week’s opener Swallow Me, written by recent Festival emerging playwright award winner Josh Tyler and featuring Rory Walker. The Fringe has been full of beans – not least the grunge energy of Sydney troupe, Acrobat and comedy favourites such as Rich Hall.

The international program has been stronger than ever with new seasons this week from Susannah York on the love of Shakespeare’s women, French Canadians Les Deux Mondes’ Leitmotiv and Bette Bourne, channelling Quentin Crisp in Resident Alien.

But the cult headliner has to be New Yorker Karen Finley. Back for the first time since 1994, her new show, Shut Up and Love Me, shows why she is still the poster girl for performance theory. Her show is brimming with discourses – on gender, representation, commodification and the performing body. Her show is also accessible, bawdy, endearing, alarming and confrontational – and, as ever, is dragging in a wide range of devotees.

Of course there is the shock. Finley lounges lasciviously on a red chaise longue before breaking into a frenetic parodic striptease, twiddling her nipples and generally burlesquing burlesque. She talks to the audience with an easy friendliness one minute then, taking sheets of script, begins hypermanically recounting tales of sex in the city in a series of screeching voices, erotic cadences, and Beat rhythms and repetitions that would warm the heart of Allen Ginsberg.

Karen Finley leaves no taboo unturned – whether war, incest or other features of the everlasting secret family. She also creates an inviting comic domain that demystifies anxiety and hostility by laughing hysterically in its face. She is naked half the time but it is neither prurient nor gratuitous. Her performance is not new any more – it is classic avant garde, reminding us how much the puritans have been closing up the borders again. So when she pours the honey for the finale, it is a feminist woman’s sweet revenge.

“No Taboo Unturned” The Australian, March 18, 2002, p. 15