Immersed within a set influenced by Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and David Lynch's The Elephant Man, the audience settles into the Tower Theatre for The Black Lung's production of Avast.
A young man wearing black Speedos - his body smothered in white grease paint and illustrated with phony jailhouse tattoos - is joined by a beefy Baron wearing tan calfskin pants, who just happens to have popped out of an old Westinghouse washing machine. Brothers Tom and Gareth have gathered together at The Black Lung's mythical abode upon the death of their tyrannical father. With more one liners than a Bugs Bunny cartoon the brothers dissect their disagreeable relationship under the ominous eye of their father's ghost. He sits in a highchair overseeing their diatribe armed with a flintlocked blunderbust and wearing one of those silly grandpa masks sold in crass magic shops. Beneath the chair sits a quivering mess of a man dressed in white longjohns. His only apparent purpose in this play is to be a Quivering Mess; that is, until there is an unscheduled interval, the brothers Tom and Gareth momentarily exit, and the man in white longjohns finds his feet in a sequence of deliberately offensive jokes about the menstrual cycle and malfunctioning tampons.
Some in the audience are genuinely huffed. But The Black Lung have anticipated this reaction. A couple sitting front row - who are less than obvious patsies - rise to leave. But the beefy Gareth summarily executes both, forcing each back to their seats. Apparently terrified, they do so without question, and this riotous excuse for a performance continues with 1. The uncanny appearance of the same polarbear recently seen in Jenny Kemp's Kitten. 2. A deformed contortionist wearing little but a head dress of ostrich feathers who veers on and off stage with the precision of a steam engine. 3. A matriarchal puppet, lifesize and leering, that performs a rattling dance of death, and 4: a suave, straw hatted man whose one purpose is to wrestle control of the show from those endlessly dueling banjos, Tom and Gareth. From the Goons through to Black Adder, via Monty Python and The Young Ones, add a dash of Red Dwarf and there you have it, The Black Lung.
Avast is a slick rendition of men done with their mother's embrace, who then set about finding their masculinity among the ashes of a dysfunctional family. Some have argued that this is its failing; that the absence of a pronounced feminine presence is not simply denigrating to women, but a disgrace. There may be some validity in this charge. But I suspect it will make little difference to The Black Lung. And good luck to them... More concerned with shaping an authentic anarchist impulse residing somewhere in the company's collective imagination, these performers have ample time to repair their feminine side. Meanwhile, the show must go on in the funereal loungeroom of the entrepreneurial Black Lung Theatre and Whaling Firm
Avast
Performers: Sacha Bryning,
Gareth Davies, Thomas Henning,
Mark Winter, Thomas Wright &
Dylan Young
Sound Design: Liam Barton
Lighting Design: Govin Ruben
Stage Manager: Eva Tandy
The Tower Theatre, CUB Malthouse,
Melb., Nov. 15 - Dec. 6
*images by jeff busby
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