Review: A Black Joy

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POSTED: 30 SEPTEMBER 2009

A Black Joy, by Declan Greene

(fortyfive downstairs, Melbourne | Until 4 October)

Admit it. Sometime in your life you’ve felt that certain glee at the visible misery of the rich and famous that’s only afforded by the curious condition, schadenfreude.

We connect with our stars solely through contrived vehicles of manufactured glamour — TV, film, glossy magazines, web galleries. They demand this reaction. And we oblige in spades.

A Black Joy offers up celebrity on a platter. It’s a gluttonous, self-fulfilling train wreck. Clad in a nursing gown, the ageing Bette Davis (Carole Patullo) spoonfeeds baked beans driplike to bedridden, obese John Candy (Tom Considine). Child star Dakota Fanning (Miriam Glaser) clings to the childhood leukaemia that brought her the sort of fame wrought only from the pitying lens of the ratings-eyed reporters of 60 Minutes. Teenager Corey Haim (Ash Flanders) terrorises his mother, the anxious and over-medicated Diane Keaton (Anne Browning), with the foul and wretched rants of a Hollywood psycho killer. And with all this going on, you can’t be certain if writer Declan Greene sees 21st-century celebrity as the cause or effect of this altogether putrid circus of the grotesque.

Each character, always addressed in full, embodies all the big names. Joseph Cotton (Chris Bunworth) is every politician’s inner smiling assassin, John Candy carries the weight of a world that denigrates and is yet captivated by the increasing number of the morbidly obese. Only the blonde B-grade bombshell (Megan Twycross) with the accidental sex video and an heiress’s mien is nameless. Too obvious? Or are she and her army of sisters now just too common to require any discrete moniker?

The action all happens on a small stage in the round at one of Melbourne’s most delightful mixed art venues, Fortyfive Downstairs. Onlookers surround the private lives of these famous names just as they do in the ‘real world’.

Interlinked by ugly secrets, their tales are uncovered with the glibness of a paperboy announcing the next headline. The set up is uncomfortable, stark and replete with a torrent of oaths to make a trooper blush, and this makes for some seriously funny scenes.

The best happen between Diane Keaton and the invisible “cleaner”. Anne Browning enthrals as she navigates a dialogue with the physically absent but very palpable figure of the unexpectedly terrifying ‘dyke house cleaner’, played by the dissonant strings of the off-stage cello (Alastair Watts).

And despite the homages to cannibalism, and the endless string of taboos like the ‘feeder’ fetish, it is this unseen character that has us clenching our jaws a little harder and squirming in unqualified discomfort. Director Susie Dee has worked this element hard and it’s payed off.

The lighting and fragmentary use of multimedia are well handled, sound design is just enough to cradle the action without stealing the limelight. The performances are all quite good, though not entirely consistent, which I daresay comes from the occasionally ambiguous text.

A Black Joy skims the world of distaste but never quite gathers enough courage to plunge in. Instead it periodically reels itself back from the edge and offers us a candy cane as reward for our patience. Perhaps not what Greene originally had in mind.

In the tradition of works inspired by the seven deadly sins and the theatre of the grotesque, A Black Joy hits and misses. There are some promising aspects of this Melbourne Fringe production though and the festival would indeed be a lesser place without it.

So with your schadenfreude on overdrive, there’s no need to be coy. Enjoy it.

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