Theatre
Murray Bramwell

First Night

Conceived and Devised by Forced Entertainment
Royalty Theatre, Adelaide
10 March

I Bought a Spade at Ikea to Dig My Own Grave

Creator/ Director Rodrigo Garcia
La Carniceria Teatro
12 March

The relationship between the performer and audience is ever perilous but usually it is held in equilibrium by convention and goodwill. In their high concept, high risk show, First Night, Forced Entertainment, a company whose very name is ironic, sets out to destabilise all that. They are not the first to try. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi in 1896 pioneered this kind of deliberate havoc, as have anti-theatre exponents such as Peter Handke, with his Offending the Audience from 1966.

Featuring seven variety performers who are as inept as they are indifferent to their tasks, First Night has blind-folded mind-readers predicting dire consequences, bigoted stand-up comedians, deliberately incompetent choreography and a striptease act which consists of popping balloons with a cigarette. It is discomforting, didactic and relentlessly withholding, as the performers constantly deconstruct what is occuring.

We have got the point, however, in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the time are left to wonder where else it can go. Apart from one performer who insists that we forget about everything outside this theatre while she recites a long and disturbing list of taboos and traumas, there is little to engage us. Rather than robust controversy we get only sarcasm and sophistry – so the choices for the audience are either meek compliance or self-fulfilling philistinism. The concept seems to me a tired one. Besides, the theatre of excruciation is everywhere about us. Have director Tim Etchells and the other members of the company seen Steve Coogan and Ricky Gervais’s The Office recently ?

I can’t imagine anyone wanting product placement in I Bought a Spade at Ikea to Dig My Own Grave, a ragout of confrontational performances from Spanish company La Carniceria Teatro (literally translated – the butchery of theatre.) Opening with the brilliant and startling image of performers with credit cards bloodily wedged in their foreheads and cheeks we know we are in for an iconoclastic ride as the opening monologue by Juan Loriente jibes satirically at consumerism, tourism, mobile phones and so on.

Three players smear themselves with half-defrosted lasagne while a fourth incongruously sings an aria from Puccini. An excess of food and gluttony predominates as performers spray the stage with cornflakes and later perform grotesqueries with handfuls of pasta and franks. Like their feigned denigration of Mandela, Gandhi, Maradona and St Santiago and the blasphemous crucifixion with hotdogs, much of the unruly rebellion is more about baiting the bourgeois than making any kind of systematic statement. La Carniceria Teatro have plenty of engaging moments but, for all their sauce, they end up spraying wide of their targets.

The Australian, March 14, 2004.