Hayes Theatre, June 24,
8/10
Finally! Theatre that embraces the bizarre! It makes you realise how just mundane so much art of all stripes really is; how it sets about fulfilling expectations, rather than subverting them.
House of Rot is Uber-theatrical, as it dances between Dada, theatre of the absurd and musical cabaret. Like a highwire act, or a virtuoso driver dancing on the pedals of a Formula One car, it’s always on the edge; in this case a line between the exhilarating and a slightly awkward self-consciousness.
Created by director Dino Dimitriadis and musical director Victoria Falconer, House of Rot is inspired by the famed 1975 documentary Grey Gardens, which captured a reclusive ruling-class mother and daughter, Big Edie and Little Edie, the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in all their eccentricity, squalor and bickering decrepitude.
Dimitriadis has Paul Capsis and Adam Noviello loosely playing those two characters, whom he lifts out of that documentary and into a fantasia of musical and visual possibilities. While there’s no narrative, per se, nor is this cabaret in the conventional sense of an artist singing and chatting – although it does launch Hayes Theatre’s Winter Cabaret Season with a reminder that nothing needs be done as it’s been done before.
Capsis and Noviello are joined by Falconer on vocals, piano, keyboard, samples and viola, and she’s conspired with Jarrad Payne to craft the thrilling sound design, which joins the costumes (Nicole & Ford) and the lighting (BROCKMAN) in creating a constant air of weirdness and jittery extravagance – which, in turn, harks back to Grey Gardens. It’s a world in which Capsis and Noviello can excel, the pair sharing a capacity for making performative extravagance the norm. Routinely striking when singing, they share lapses of conviction, however, in delivering some of the absurdist text.
The show begins with the gifted Falconer singing The Windmills of Your Mind, a song that’s common enough cabaret fodder, but Falconer reminds us afresh how oneiric it is, with its stream-of consciousness words and endlessly spiralling melody. Capsis grabs I Am What I Am by the throat, before Tea for Two – like Windmills, another songwriting masterpiece – becomes a recurring motif.
Songs are mashed and moulded to the needs of the show, as is everything else. Noviello sits naked at the piano to sing I Touch Myself (beautifully), and Capsis puts masking tape on his face to mimic sunscreen in an “outdoor” sequence. When he then tears it off, you feel a wince ripple through the room. Were the season longer, the poor man might have needed a skin graft.
It’s that sort of show. I’d rather see artists taking chances, and therefore making the odd misstep, than endlessly rehashing what we’ve seen before. Catch it. Although imperfect, it will widen your eyes and periodically prickle the hairs on your neck.