Review: Pennies from Kevin

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Above left: Phillip Scott & Helen Dallimore

Above right: Jonathan Biggins, Phillip Scott, Helen Dallimore & Drew Forsythe

Photographer: Tracey Schramm

Below: Jonathan Biggins & Drew Forsythe.

POSTED: 09 NOVEMBER 2009

Pennies from Kevin: The Wharf Revue, by Jonathan Biggins, Drew Forsyth & Phillip Scott

Sydney Theatre Company | Wharf 1, Walsh Bay | Until 6 Dec (then at Sydney Theatre, Walsh Bay, 9–12 Dec)

It’s been said that a vibrant, unfettered community of cartoonists is the real key to a thriving democracy ... that a few inspired strokes of a pen from the likes of Petty and Tandberg can reveal more about our leaders and institutions than can any number of words from journalists and political commentators.

If that’s true — and I believe it probably is — then leading onstage satirists, such as Jonathan Biggins and the team he assembles annually for The Wharf Revue, are only less effective because they can’t reach quite as many people as does the popular press.

Right from the opening moments of Pennies from Kevin, Biggins and his costars — Drew Forsythe, Phillip Scott and Helen Dallimore — are in very, very slick control of the stage and push all the right buttons not just to entertain but also to continually provoke, challenge and say so succinctly what the audience usually can’t find the words for.

I’m sure there were many there on opening night who believe that the Rudd Government is heading down a well worn path. Who, though, would have put it to song with the line “Howard days are here again ...”?

There are many highlights in this two-hour-plus show — far too many to recount here, indeed far too many to accurately remember. For the following couple of days, there were moments of sheer pleasure as a scene or line floated into mind and brought a hearty guffaw.

Dallimore makes a wickedly good Julia Gillard, à la Hermione, in Kevin Potter and the Lower Chamber of Secrets. Never, surely, has the Minister for Industrial Relations been so irreverent and so buxom.

She also makes a fine Supremes-style Michelle Obama, but it’s as Amanda Vanstone — on her ambassadorial mission to nail a sainthood for Mary McKillop and eat Italy out of food — that Dallimore really shines.

Dressed in an oversized outfit that would have done Talking Heads’ David Byrne (remember the video clip for Stop Making Sense) proud, she leads a wonderfully chaotic piece of Wharf Revue brilliance. So un-PC, but so, so, so funny.

Biggins plays a great role in this sketch, too, waddling around the stage on his knees as a midget-sized Pope, occasionally breaking out into Nazi-isms that would have seriously perturbed the PC police.

He also does seriously good versions of Bob Brown (singing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah in a seemingly never-ending dirge of self-righteousness), Barry Jones, Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Turnbull.

Scott, who is also the show’s musical director and plays a pretty mean piano, successfully fills the Kevin role, is very funny as a hotdogged Steve Fielding and, for this writer anyway, so beautifully evoked the dumbing down of our food at the hands of the big two supermarket chains in the Omnivore’s Dilemma sketch.

But, in the end, it’s Forsyth — and especially the way that he can contort his face into so many wild and weird expressions — who provides the absolute highlights.

There’s the gnomelike Godwin Grech, the evangelistic Nick Xenephon pleading the River Murray’s case to the tune of Swanee, and a delightfully shambolic Bob Ellis delivering a monologue that the iconic left-wing writer would almost have been envious of.

As in any revue there are some points higher than others, the lower ones only seeming so because of the absolute gems presented elsewhere. All I can do is lift from The Bill, and say: “Go! Go! Go!”

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