Sydney Town Hall, January 16
1.5/10
You enter to find people skating around an oval on the Town Hall’s floor. Different, you think. Last year, it was the wild west; this year a roller-skating rink. You sit and watch these helmeted women going around and around, forwards, and then, clearly aware of the need for entertainment value, backwards. What I didn’t know at the time was that this was as good as the show got.
Devised by Clare Watson and the ridiculously talented Virginia Gay, with the former directing, this contends for the worst Sydney Festival show I’ve seen in the event’s half century. I can’t believe no one ever stood back and thought, “Oh, it’s not really working, is it?”
The story, I presume, was aimed at such intellectually impaired creatures as spaniels. Mama Maxine (Amber McMahon) and teenaged daughter Billie (Elvy-Lee Quici) are strangers in a new town. Mama falls in with Drew “The Wombat” (Annabel Matheson) who indulges in Roller Derby (which rhymes with “herby”). Like the brave McMahon in real life, Mama is not a skater, but, against Billie’s sage advice, she becomes involved, and ends up – and this is hardly a spoiler, being sports story 101 – helping her team triumph.
Huzzah, I hear you say.
The subplot’s about why Billie is a less-than-model student, with Mama and Billie attending counselling (also Matheson), where we learn that Mama might not have been a model mama. On cue, she has a fling with the dim-witted Dave (Dylan Miller). Billie, meanwhile, is living a good cop/bad cop existence with a genuinely likable new school friend, Hux (Aud Mason-Hyde), and a (psychological) monster under her bed. Played by Benjamin Hancock and startlingly costumed by Jonathon Oxlade, the monster, Nathan, is the show’s highlight: balletic, creepy, slimy and malevolent in equal measure. Alas, his impact was undermined by his voice’s sinister electronic treatment being exaggerated to the point of frequent unintelligibility.
Well thought out.
There’s also a live band. Now, before we go there, let me say that I’ve heard music at truly appalling outdoor and indoor venues, and Sydney Town Hall has been one of the city’s worst for anything other than the organ since 1890. This was a new low. The bass (Calliope Jackson) was inaudible, the guitar and vocals (Joe Paradise Lui) marginally present, and the drums (Antoine Jelk) deep inside my cranium thrashing around trying to get out. Thankfully, Jelk was also preoccupied with playing Billie’s driving instructor, which prevented the “music” being a constant.
The acoustics also sabotaged the actors. What were intended as intimate exchanges between Mama and Billie sounded like stage announcements at Glastonbury Festival, and, anyway, the acting, despite the gifted McMahon’s best efforts, was forced, sterile and (Mason-Hyde, apart) charmless.
Which brings us back to the skaters. These were real roller derby skaters having their moment in the sun. They deserved to be extras in a better show.