Enlightenment 

(The Enlightenment of the Siddhartha Gautama Buddha and the Encounter with the Monkey King – Great Sage, Equal of Heaven)
Written by Joe Paradise Lui
Directed by Marcel Dorney
Elbow Room Productions
Perth Studio Underground

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

The late-70s Japanese TV series Monkey is one of my all-time favourite shows. The English-dubbed version was broadcast by the BBC when I was at Cambridge in the early 80s, and I became an instant fan. 

 

Growing up in Lower Flügelhorn I’d been glued to the TV screen after school watching the 60s Japanese historical action series Shintaro and the 70s American East-meets-Western series Kung Fu (both dubbed into German for Austrian TV). Then as a budding teenage cinephile I’d eagerly devoured Hong Kong 70s martial arts movies like Five Fingers of Death and Fist of Fury with German subtitles on weekend excursions to Vienna. 

 

As a nostalgic overseas student at Cambridge, I loved Monkey’s combination of fight scenes, slapstick comedy, Chinese folklore, Buddhist wisdom, and (in the BBC version) rapid-fire dialogue in ‘Asian’ accents by British actors – not to mention the head-banging theme song ‘Monkey Magic’ about the title character (‘the punkiest monkey that ever popped’), which I later covered back in Vienna with my prog rock band The Flying Squirrels. 

 

Later my interest in literature led me to the 16^th century Chinese novel Journey to the West on which Monkey was based – a novel which was in turn inspired by the pilgrimage to India of 7^th century Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzhang. Eventually my para-phenomenological researches took me on my own inner journey to the East after having visited India and Nepal with my parents as a 10-year old – see my blog post last year at http://humphreybower.blogspot.com/2022/01/

Perth-based Singaporean-Chinese-Australian theatre-maker Joe Paradise Lui has long been on his own personal, artistic, political and spiritual pilgrimage. A mainstay of the Perth independent and mainstage theatre scene, he's created his own post-dramatic contemporary performance works (many devised in collaboration with other local independent luminaries) for his company Renegade Productions; lent his freelance talents as a lighting and sound designer, director, composer, musician and actor to innumerable productions by other companies and fellow artists; and undoubtedly clocked in more shows at The Blue Room (allegedly two hundred and counting) than any other artist in history. 

 

Even by his own eclectic standards Enlightenment is an unusual addition to the Joe Lui oeuvre because it flexes his muscles as a playwright rather than a contemporary performance maker, and because he’s entrusted its first production to another director and company in a different city: namely, Melbourne-based director Marcel Dorney and his company Elbow Room (though Lui was seemingly unable to resist the temptation of designing the lighting and sound as well). The production premiered in Melbourne at Northcote Town Hall in early 2000 with the intention of transferring to Perth; but events took an unexpected turn with the onset of the pandemic and the closure of state borders; and it took almost two years for the show to hit the road for a cruelly brief four-night season at the Perth Studio Underground.

 

In fact Enlightenment reminds me of another anomalous work in the Lui canon: the confessional solo show Letters Home, which he wrote, directed, designed and performed at The Blue Room in 2015. That show reflected on the journey from his birthplace in the authoritarian city-state of Singapore to his self-imposed exile in Perth: first as an international student and then as a renegade artist, after deciding at the last minute not to go home on the completion of his studies. Despite our very different trajectories I related deeply to that show as a former international student at Cambridge and later self-imposed exile in Perth myself after the formation of the far-right Austrian coalition government in 2000 – an event which now seems to presage the global rise of right-wing populism over the last two decades.

 

Unlike Letters Home the genre of Enlightenment is not confessional. Instead it might be described as a mash-up of mythic/religious epic, social/political satire, erotic/crime thriller, romantic comedy and superhero movie: think Strindberg’s Road to Damascus meets Brecht’s Good Person of Szechuan meets Fatal Attraction meets My Super Ex-Girlfriend. Nevertheless, a confessional element is surely present even if in a disguised form. Like Strindberg and Brecht, Lui dons the masks of his dramatis personae in order to wrestle with personal questions about identity, sex, religion, ethics and politics.  

 

In particular, the character-avatars of The Buddha and The Monkey King as they appear in the play seem like dual aspects of a single person (conceivably the playwright himself). As such they’re reminiscent of the way the ‘good’ prostitute Shen Te in The Good Person of Szechuan splits off a part of herself and pretends to be her ‘bad’ male cousin Shui Ta in order to survive in a broken world (a splitting that also arguably reflected Brecht’s own compartmentalised personality).

 

Enlightenment is set in a comic-book-style generic dystopian metropolis that could be Perth, Melbourne, Singapore or Gotham City. The plot concerns an idle rich young Asian princess Sid (played by Alice Qin), a contemporary avatar of the young prince Siddhartha Gautama, who renounced his former life and became the Buddha. Sid hooks up via a dating app with angry young hustler Sage (Merlynn Tong), likewise an avatar of the legendary Monkey King (the title character in Monkey), who called himself ‘great Sage, equal of Heaven’ and was imprisoned under a mountain by the Buddha, until freed after promising to serve the monk Tang Sanzang in Journey to the West (Tripitaka in the TV series) on his pilgrimage to India. 

 

A sub-plot features two hapless straight White male cops (John Marc Desengano and Conor Gallacher), who I fancied might also be avatars of Tripitaka’s monster-companions Sandy and Pigsy in Monkey and Journey to the West (Sandy was a particular favourite of mine). Like their originals, they provide comic relief as objects of satirical mockery, though things take a somewhat darker turn when Sage gets pulled over for speeding and is recognized as the poster of a viral online video threatening to kill a cop in a violently explicit manner as revenge for a previous harassment. Elbow Room co-artistic director Emily Tomlins played a series of characters including a streetwalker, Sid’s housemaid, a police chief and a narrator-figure who was ultimately revealed (without being explicitly named) as the Buddha himself in his deified form.

 

Enlightenment deftly sutures Eastern and Western high art and pop culture in a way that’s worthy of Monkey itself and the TV shows and movies that followed it, right up to Tarantino’s Kill Bill or more recently (and most brilliantly) the Daniels Kwan and Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All At Once (easily my film of year for 2022). The production also featured an exhilarating performance by Merlynn Tong as Sage/Monkey, encompassing all the registers of the genre mash-up from slapstick comedy to rom-com cuteness, horror-movie terror, monstrous rage and spiritual angst. 

 

The characters, scenes, dialogue and plot owe more to popular film and TV than to a more rigorous and fleshed-out dramaturgy like Brecht's (at least in his mature work). In short, this is a form of theatre mediated by the screen – big, small and hand-held. As such it assumes a degree of pop-culture literacy on the part of an audience for its shorthand to communicate. Scenes are mostly short and begin or end abruptly; dialogue is relentlessly snappy or self-consciously cheesy (‘You’re so corny!’ is a signature catchcry); and there are holes, jumps and coincidences in the plot that a regular viewer of popular film or TV would easily take in their stride. 

 

The queering of the relationship between Sid and Sage is a refreshing twist on the standard rom-com formula – as well as a nod to the casting of a woman as the monk Tripitaka in the original Monkey TV series (one of that show’s many delights). Admittedly the portrayal of a queer relationship between two women as a ‘safe space’ free of patriarchal and heterosexual norms initially seemed a little idealised (including the orgasmic sex). In any event, their honeymoon period ended when it came to personal and class differences (though such differences were probably a plus when it came to orgasmic sex). 

 

However, the characterisation of both protagonists seemed a little lacking in backstory and motivation (in the case of Sage) or (in the case of Sid) as an avatar of the Buddha, even at the stage of unenlightened Bodhisattva. As a result, the climax of the play (or rather its anti-climax) felt contrived and implausible, with Sid convincing Sage to turn herself in, learning at second-hand from the police about her alleged betrayal, and then betraying and abandoning her in return – a somewhat complicated parallel to the Buddha’s entrapment of Monkey in the original story.

 

The minor characters were more two-dimensional and as such easy targets – especially the clownish cops, who seemed unsuited to their roles when the plot took a more sinister turn. They were also easy targets in a double sense, as Sage’s cop-killing harangue had unfortunate overtones in the light of recent events, which made it hard to laugh despite Tong’s ebullient delivery (a little rewriting here would be an easy fix).

 

Despite her stage presence and acting chops, I found the casting of Tompkins in her series of roles problematic, especially when she was revealed as the Buddha in the final scene. (In fact I was initially unsure ‘who’ she was in this scene, possibly because I’d identified Qin in the role of the Buddha up to that point.) Doubtless having a White actor with platinum blonde hair playing these roles was intended to be ironic. However her final manifestation as the Buddha felt clunky, as did the reduction of the Enlightened One to a variation on Tompkins’s earlier role as the police chief. Perhaps this clunkiness was likewise meant to be ironic, like a deus ex machina in a Greek tragedy. However, it had the retroactive effect of making Tompkins’s cumulative role seem like that of a White puppet-master throughout the play. As such, it left me confused as to the target of the play’s critique: Buddhism; wealth and privilege; or a more generalized notion of power in all its forms. 

To represent these alternatives as isomorphic surely involves a false equivalence. To be sure, we can attribute the emergence of Buddhism to a certain historical moment or class outlook. However, to reduce it to a form of ruling class ideology is as simplistic as reducing Christianity to what Nietzsche called the morality of slaves; and to identify Buddhism with theocracy, patriarchy, heteronormativity or White supremacy is a bit of a stretch. 

 

More broadly, to lump caste, class, race, gender or sexuality together as forms of oppression is to ignore the specificity of each and use a blunt instrument when more specialized tools are needed. Alongside a Nietzschean hammer, a Marxist sickle comes in handy, along with an anti-racist bolt-cutter, a feminist nutcracker, a queer screwdriver, and perhaps even a philosophical or theological torch to shine some light on things. 

As an aside: a common contemporary reading of Nietzsche or my old friend Michel Foucault leads to a similar oversimplification about power and its seeming ineluctability. However, Foucault was always careful to remind people that ‘where there is power, there is resistance’ – and therefore the possibility of freedom, which he said was the ontological condition of power and the underlying theme of his work. My old friend Jean-Francois Lyotard’s distinction between pouvoir and puissance (which might be translated as ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ power) also comes in handy here. The distinction helps us to maintain a sense of political optimism, as opposed to pessimism or cynicism (which Nietzsche said are the hallmarks of a slave morality) – but I’m wandering off the track.

 

To return to the play: possibly casting a non-White actor like Desengano (who gave an engaging performance as the more likeable of the two cops) instead of Tompkins in some of these roles would have helped. Alternatively (or additionally) having Qin play the Buddha in the final scene would have developed the relationship between Buddha and Monkey as a qualitative dialectic between alternately attracting and opposing personalities or forces (like Apollo and Dionysus) as well as socio-economic classes (like bourgeois and proletarian or master and servant). Instead, it was reduced to a quantitative difference between power and powerlessness that ultimately appeared to be about colonisation and race.

 

With substitution of a White Buddha in the final scene, Sid’s character-arc was left unfinished – unlike the story of Siddhartha, who leaves his life of privilege and enters a period of asceticism before finding the middle way of enlightenment and becoming the Buddha. Foreshortening this dialectic of enlightenment (to borrow a phrase from my old friends Adorno and Horkheimer) in the case of both characters led to a simple reinforcement of social and psychological structures with no possibility of change.

 

The original story is more complex (even in the TV show). Monkey is tricked and imprisoned by the Buddha, but later released by the Boddhisatva Guanyin; and the golden circlet of restraint placed around Monkey’s head by Guanyin and activated whenever Monkey becomes violent represents the force of conscience rather than oppression – with the promise of liberation once enlightenment is attained. Thus one might argue both Buddha and Monkey undergo a similar journey from excess (of wealth and privilege in the one case, or aggressiveness and the lust for power in the other) to privation (asceticism in the case of the Buddha, imprisonment and servitude in the case of Monkey) before finding the middle way and reaching enlightenment, which ends the cycle of suffering. This spiritual path arguably points the way to a political one as well (see my ‘Buddhism, Critical Theory, Post-Structuralism: Liberation Theology for a Neoliberal Age’ (Buddhismus, Kritische Theorie, Poststrukturalismus: Befreiungstheologie für Ein Neoliberales Zeitalte, translated by Humphrey Bower, unpublished). 

 

However, by foreshortening the dialectic of enlightenment to a vicious circle of entrapment and betrayal, the ending of Enlightenment (at least in this production) left the audience feeling as trapped and betrayed as Sage herself by the prospect of a revolution forever forestalled (a common reading of Adorno and Horkheimer too, by the way, which is just as cynical and pessimistic as the reading of Nietzsche and Foucault mentioned earlier).

 

This feeling of entrapment was reinforced by Cherish Marrington’s otherwise elegant set: a temple-like structure featuring steps rising from the forestage to a platform framed by an architrave of curtains and a roof-shaped banner onto which neon-outlined street-protest or emoji-style illustrations by Chinese dissident cartoonist Badiucao were projected. The whole ensemble was evocative of both ancient and contemporary China, but entrances and exits were made cumbersome by having actors slink behind the curtains and then clamber onto or off the stage – notwithstanding much creative use of fabrics being draped over bodies to ‘conceal’ them while they were having sex or make them ‘appear’ or ‘disappear’ at the beginning or end of scenes. 

 

Similarly, I loved the use of Mandarin surtitles throughout, but their impact was skewed by projecting them onto the bottom right-hand corner of the architrave rather than across the lintel above the action, where the Badiucao projections – while striking – were ultimately little more than decorative distractions. Alternatively, it might have been simpler and more effective (and more Brechtian) to do the whole thing on a bare floor or platform and project the surtitles across the back wall, allowing the space to transform as needed from bedroom to street and the actors to come and go without needing to hide anything.

 

The most disturbing scene (and arguably the turning point) in the play is when Sage is pulled over by the cops and identified, after which things rapidly spiral out of control. This was staged in darkness using voiceover, allowing the audience’s imagination to flesh things out. However, the impact of the scene was reduced by the fact that the cops had previously been played for laughs, and by the close-mic voiceover delivery (both factors made it hard to discern if these were even the same cops). Perhaps if Sage had recorded the event on her phone (like her online harangue at the start of the play) and played it back to Sid onstage, the device would have been more dramatically effective and allowed for more interesting possibilities in terms of the couple’s subsequent choices, as well as making the scene feel less like exploitation/torture-porn.

 

In sum: there’s a great play here about the relationship between Sid and Sage – whether in the fully realised form of a Brechtian parable, thriller, rom-com, superhero movie, or all of the above – waiting to be liberated like a trapped Monkey from beneath the mountain of intertextuality under which Enlightenment currently labours. That play (even in its current avatar-form) awaits a production that would strip away the artistic and cultural baggage of temple-structures and problematic casting to deliver the work’s potentially hilarious, sexy, touching, searing, terrifying and liberating message. The process of liberation might involve the original Monkey and Buddha stories being fully integrated and transcended; the violence of the artist-renegade being tempered by the golden circlet of theatrical discipline; and their artistic and spiritual pilgrimage from East to West and back again being accomplished.

 

Meanwhile, if the heavy-handedness of this critique of the play and production seems like using a hammer to crack a walnut – well, that’s how you crack a walnut, if you want to get to the kernel of things. It’s also a tribute to the thoughtful and thought-provoking nature of the artistic team and their work.

 

*

 

Enlightenment (The Enlightenment Of The Siddhartha Gautama Buddha And The Encounter With The Monkey King – Great Sage, Equal of Heaven) was at The Studio Underground, State Theatre Centre of WA, from December 14 to 17.

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the phenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Phänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. After leaving Cambridge he spent some years in Paris as Michel Foucault’s barber and personal stylist and as Jean-Francois Lyotard’s personal shopper, in which capacity he is said to have influenced the latter’s move away from libidinal economics towards the theory of language games as well as towards wearing more layers of clothing. On returning to Austria he was the lead vocalist and flugelhorn player in Viennese prog-rock/jazz-fusion band The Flaming Squirrels (Die Flammende Eichhörnchen). He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the formation of the far-right coalition federal government, vowing never to return. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

Return to Seoul

Perth Festival Lotterywest Films

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

When I was a precocious 14-year-old schoolboy in Lower Flügelhorn my parents allowed me (possibly unwisely) to go on a one-year student exchange program to Melbourne, Australia, where I was billeted with the family of my future friend and colleague Humphrey Bower. I didn’t speak English but learned the language and culture immersively. Without realising it at the time I was repeating my mother’s childhood exile from Austria with her parents which took place before the Nazi occupation in 1938. History, as Marx said, repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Later I would continue this pattern by going to Cambridge to study philosophy, and finally by going into voluntary exile from Austria after the election of the far-right coalition government in 2000. 

 

Davy Chou is a Cambodian-French filmmaker whose parents emigrated to Paris before most of their remaining family were killed by the Khmer Rouge. He ‘returned’ to Cambodia for the first time to make Golden Slumbers (2012), a documentary featuring relics and interviews with witnesses from the ‘golden’ era of Cambodian filmmaking that preceded the Khmer Rouge regime under which over 400 films were lost or destroyed and most the artists who worked on them were killed or fled. His subsequent film Diamond Island (2016) featured a cast of young debut actors and dealt with a teenager from a rural province in Cambodia who comes to Phnom Penh to earn money as a construction worker on a half-finished luxury development and is reunited with a long-lost older brother. 

 

Return to Seoul (2022) similarly deals with themes of trauma, loss, migration, reunion, heritage, identity and coming to terms with the past (the original English title was All The People I’ll Never Be). Freddie (a mesmerising debut from Ji Min Park) is a free-spirited but emotionally dissociated 25-year-old French-Korean adoptee who returns to her country of origin for the first time since she was a baby and embarks on a journey of discovery that includes learning the language and culture and eventually seeking out her birth-parents. Chou has explained in interviews that he based Freddie on a French-Korean adoptee-friend who accompanied him to South Korea for the screening of Golden Slumbers in Busan and was reunited with her birth parents; and that the character was further developed in collaboration with Park; but that the film (co-written with Claire Maugendre) also draws on his own life.  

 

Park’s performance drives the film, her alternately radiant or coldly expressionless face in almost every frame, half-filling it in close-up or carefully placed as if almost lost or forgotten in carefully composed wide shots. Her co-star is Seoul itself and other locations in South Korea where most of the film is shot apart from a final scene in Romania, all evocatively captured in luminous colours by cinematographer Thomas Favel and fluidly edited by Dounia Sichov. The city changes mood and identity in the course of the film as dramatically as Freddie herself, who in a series of time-jumps over the ensuing years transforms from casual slacker to glamorous femme fatale to high-class arms dealer and finally globe-wandering backpacker, seeking or offering and then rejecting or withholding affection from random strangers, lovers, friends, colleagues and family along the way.

 

Return to Seoul resists the temptation of psychological, sociological or moral commentary about the ‘issue’ of adoption in favour of a meditation on the elusive nature of identity and belonging, meaning and purpose, being and desire. Freddie ceases to be a case-history and becomes an everywoman perpetually trapped by her own and others’ demands for love. The final shot of her pausing to sight-read Bach’s despairing supplication Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ at a hotel foyer piano in Romania on her birthday before leaving without even checking in – and after learning that an email to her birth mother has bounced – is an exquisite image of existential abandonment and transcendental homelessness. 

 

*

 

Return to Seoul screens at Somerville Auditorium, University of Western Australia, as part of Perth Festival Lotterywest Films from Mon 12 to Sunday 18 December.

 

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born and raised in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. After finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Lower Flügelhorn he completed his doctoral thesis at Cambridge on the later Wittgenstein and the paraphenomenology of language games (Der später Wittgenstein und die Paraphänomenologie den Sprachspielen, unpublished) under the supervision of Wittgenstein’s student and literary executor Elizabeth Anscombe, whose famous paper ‘The First Person’ argues that the pronoun ‘I’ does not refer to anything. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

D*ck Pics in the Garden of Eden
Written and directed by Jeffrey Jay Fowler
The Last Great Hunt
Subiaco Theatre Centre

Oil by Ella Hickson
Directed by Adam Mitchell
Black Swan State Theatre Company
Heath Ledger Theatre 

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

 

Last week I saw Black Swan State Theatre Company’s production of Oil by Ella Hickson at the Heath Ledger Theatre and The Last Great Hunt's production of Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s D*ck Pics in the Garden of Eden at the Subiaco Theatre Centre. 

 

That’s what it said on the program: ‘THE LAST GREAT HUNT PRESENTS Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s D*CK PICS in the Garden of Eden’. In the event, I’m relieved to say, I didn’t see Jeffrey Jay Fowler’s or anyone else's d*ck pics in the Garden of Eden or anywhere else. However, there were lots of soft fake d*cks, breasts, nipples and pubic hair on the outside of buffoonish padded body suits worn by the cast and designed by Maeli Cherel, who also designed the appropriately shag-pile-carpeted set. 

 

D*ck Pics and Oil are epic works whose central characters travel through time and space across history. There are other similarities between the two plays and productions. Both are parables, one focussing on gender and sexuality, the other on the oil industry; both tell the intergenerational story of a single family; both hover somewhat uncertainly between allegory and realism; both have unusually large casts for Perth (8 and 10 respectively); both have multiple actors playing the same characters or the same actors playing the same or different characters across multiple generations, with sometimes confusing results; and both use multiracial casting in sometimes problematic ways. Finally, both appear progressive, but I found both surprisingly reactionary in the way they represent the relationships between power, gender, sexuality, race and class. 

 

In fact, despite its multiracial cast and the fact that it's largely set in ‘Suburbia’, D*ck Pics ignores race and class completely, a common oversight in much white middle-class Australian theatre, and one which is not addressed simply by casting more non-white actors. It retells the story of Adam and Eve who appear in various guises played by different actors; their children Cain ‘The Unashamed’ (as his epithet reads in the program) and Lulu ‘The Overshadowed’ (an addition to the Biblical story – there’s no Abel in this version); God and Lucifer; and Adam’s first wife Lilith (who appears in Jewish mythology and may be derived from the dual creation accounts in Genesis); the first scenes are set in the Garden of Eden, and most of the rest of the play is set in ‘Suburbia’. This narrative thread is interwoven with the coming-out story of Dick Dickson, Cain’s high school teacher and a wannabe stand-up comic who has sex with Lilith and later Cain. 

 

Fowler, his fellow creatives and the cast have lots of fun with the early pantomime-like ‘Eden’ scenes, which feature a clueless Adam ‘The First Man’ (David Vickman), an ingenuous Eve ‘Made of Rib’ (Arielle Gray), Lucifer ‘The Serpent’ (Iya Ware) and the rest of the cast as various creatures frolicking around on the carpeted floor, discovering and exploring their fake appendages and each other, and settling into stereotypical gender-based power dynamics. These dynamics get played out with a sharper satirical edge in the subsequent ‘Suburbia’ scenes between Adam ‘The Father’ (Ben Sutton), Eve ‘The Mother’ (Jo Morris), Cain (Tyrone Earl Lraé Robinson), Lulu (Joanna Tu), Dick Dickson (Chris Isaacs), Lilith ‘the Wandering Demon’ (Gray), Lucifer ‘The Fallen’ (Vickman), Lilith ‘The Artist’ (Ware) and God ‘The Misplaced’ (Vickman). 

 

Dickson’s coming-out-story unfolds in a more gently ironic vein of rom-com-gone-wrong. He wears a similarly buffoonish costume and sports a somewhat smaller appendage, but otherwise the two stories seemed to belong to two different plays. In general I found the Dickson scenes more interesting, and the gay male characters in particular more three-dimensional. The Eden/Suburbia scenes and characters were more like cartoons, and the gender stereotypes were a bit reductive and predictable (notwithstanding the best efforts of the actors to flesh them out) in comparison with the ambiguity and mystery of the Bible. Moreover, those stereotypes appeared to be determined by biology or destiny rather than being enforced or learned and were reinforced through persuasion or manipulation rather than being underwritten by physical or economic coercion, despite hints of past sexual violence between Adam and Lilith. The resulting account of heterosexual relationships seemed a bit simplistic and pessimistic. In contrast, the Dickson scenes (especially between the gay characters) were more complex, unpredictable and dramatically credible. Dickson’s lame but evolving stand-up routines were a highlight of the show.

 

However, my favourite piece of writing in the play was the Director’s Statement in the program. This was actually more like a Playwright’s Statement and took the form of a Prologue to the play itself, in the guise of one of Dickson’s stand-up routines, complete with sentences that were crossed out but still legible. These included graphic descriptions of gay sex, references to homophobia, confessions of sexual insecurity and even hints of sexual abuse. I only read it after seeing the play, and it completely reframed my experience, especially of the Dickson scenes, and totally eclipsed the Garden of Eden/Suburbia plot. Now that's a play I'd love to see.

 

I also loved the Playschool-like simplicity of the design and performances, although I felt that the somewhat token use of live video feed in some scenes added little to what was already happening onstage. As for the cast: I thought everyone did sterling work, and applaud the employment of a relatively large cast and a least a few non-white faces (3 out of 8). However, I couldn’t help thinking that the story could have been told more clearly and effectively with a cast of 7 instead of 8, and without all the doubling and role-swapping. I also couldn’t help feeling that the non-white actors had the less developed roles of Cain, Lulu, Lucifer ‘The Serpent’ and Lilith ‘The Artist’. To be sure, there’s a story about race and class in the Bible which begins as soon as Adam and Eve leave the Garden of Eden and their descendants migrate into Palestine. But that’s another play entirely.

 

*

 

Notwithstanding its laudable ambitions, and the accolades it’s received since it first premiered at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2016, I found Ella Dickson’s Oil even more structurally incoherent, with an even more reductive and cheaply pessimistic reading of history and relationships – not only between women and men but between mothers and daughters. 

 

The play begins in a rural cottage in Cornwall in the 19^th Century. May (a noble performance by Hayley McElhinney) is the pregnant wife of Joss (Michael Abercrombie), who share a household with two other brothers (Will O’Mahony and St John Cowcher) and their wives (Grace Chow and Violette Ayad) presided over by the family matriarch Ma (Polly Lowe). May and Joss have a passionate physical relationship, but she longs for a better life for herself and their unborn child. The arrival of a stranger from the United States (Will Bastow) bearing the Trojan horse of a newly invented kerosene lamp and offering to buy their land provides May with an opportunity to escape – and the rest, apparently, is history. 

 

We next meet May and her mischievous daughter Amy (Abbey Morgan) in a British colonial kitchen in Tehran (which I was interested to learn is located in 'the desert’) in the early 20^th Century, where she is now a domestic servant and single mother. She manages to align her fortunes with the heartless Officer Samuel (Will O’Mahony) who sees a future in colonising and exploiting Persia for its oil deposits. Time-jump to a kitchen in London in the 1970s and the play jumps the shark in one of many increasingly implausible scenes. May has become the head of a British oil company, somewhat improbably living in the left-wing intellectual haven of Hampstead and struggling to control her now rebellious teenage daughter. She has an unexpected and rather unlikely home-visit from an official from Gaddafi’s new government in Libya (Tinashe Mangwana) who wants her to sign off on nationalising 50% of her company’s oil production in that country (such expropriations certainly took place but not as far as I’m aware in kitchens across London). Time-jump to a desert in contemporary Iraq where rebellious daughter Amy has run away and befriended a local woman (Ayad) until May (in an impeccable winter suit) shows up to fetch her home. Final time-jump to a cold dark cottage in Cornwall fifty years in the future where an ageing May and Amy are now living together again and surviving on limited power and heating until another stranger shows up bearing another Trojan Horse. This time it’s a woman from a Chinese company (Grace Chow) with a small domestic nuclear fusion device which will supply all their domestic needs for the small price of a subscription (terms and conditions attached). Throughout the play May is haunted by the Cornish husband she abandoned but still pines for; and thus apparently the whirligig of time brings on its revenges.

 

Just to be clear: I’m all in favour of characters travelling through time and other magic realist devices familiar from novels like Orlando, The Tin Drum or Midnight’s Children and plays like Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine or Top Girls. The problem with the use of time travel and magic realism in Oil is that (unlike those novels and plays) the scenes themselves are (literally) kitchen-sink realist in style and contain no elements no magic or fantasy at all (apart from jarring inaccuracies and implausibilities) with the possible exception of the final scene and the occasional appearance of May’s husband as a time-travelling ghost-narrator. As a result, the genre and tone of the play and production felt confusing: domestic drama, historical epic, social satire, ghost story, wartime adventure and absurdist sci-fi followed one after the other, gears shifting and crunching within scenes and from one scene to the next. Morever, as with D*ck Pics (and unlike the magic realist novels and plays mentioned earlier), I could see no intrinsic connection between the time-travelling mother-daughter or male-female relationships and the historical changes taking place around them. This, both plays seem to be saying, is simply what relationships and history always have been and always will be; if anything, the immutable nature of those relationships is presented as shaping history, rather than the other way around. Oil in particular seems to be saying that history repeats itself from one empire and generation to the next; that social, political, economic and environmental exploitation are the natural and inevitable consequences of scarcity, human needs or desires and technological development rather than the contingent effect of historical forces like capitalism and imperialism; and that women seeking to emancipate themselves have to give up having good sex, become bad mothers and join the ruling class. Surely we’ve moved on from this trope since Caryl Churchill skewered it in the 1980s with Top Girls? If D*ck Pics ignores race and class, and presents a somewhat binary account of gender, I found this preferable to the superficial analysis of class, race and gender in Oil, which features the tired reactionary narrative of a woman who has to be punished for going out on her own, and the exclusive portrayal of non-white characters as clowns, villains, victims, or villain-clowns. 

 

As for the production: again, I applaud the employment of a large cast and at least a few non-white actors (3 out of 10), but I cringed at the way they were used. Most egregious was the casting of Mangwana (a fine actor) who only appeared in one scene as the Libyan official ‘Mr Farouk’. Last time I checked, Libya was in North Africa, the population was almost entirely Arab or Berber, and Gadafi’s coup was part of a pan-Arab revolutionary wave across North Africa and the Middle East, so having a Black actor play a Libyan government official seemed like ignorance at best and racism at worst. To paraphrase ‘Mr Farouk’ himself, Libya may be ‘in Africa’ and ‘not the Middle East’, but at the risk of stating the obvious not all ‘Africans’ are the same. Again, just to be clear: I applaud the practice of cross-racial casting, but Mangwana only played one character, and thus appeared to have been cast specifically to play him, while several other actors (including Ayad and Chow, the other two non-white actors) played multiple roles. For example, he could easily have played May’s London boyfriend and colleague Tom, and/or one of the Cornish brothers in the opening scene, especially as Ayad and Chow played the two other Cornish wives. Conversely, Ayad (a fine actor herself) could easily have played ‘Mr Farouk’, especially as she also played the two Iraqi and Persian characters in the play. Finally, what can one say about the evil-clown Chinese character in the final scene which Chow (another fine actor) was called upon to embody, notwithstanding the comic verve with which she did it? On a similar note, I also cringed at the appropriation of the Midnite Oil song ‘Beds are Burning’ (a song about giving the Pintupi people back their land) for the final curtain call, especially for a play and production without a single Indigenous character or cast member.

 

As for the production design: the marvels of Zoe Atkinson’s smoothly transformative set, the coolness of Matt Marshall’s lighting, and the warmth of Mel Robinson’s yearning score couldn’t disguise the underlying weakness of the play. For me the opening scene in Cornwall was by far the most effective in terms of setting, plot, dialogue, characterisation, complexity, casting and staging; sadly it was all downhill from there. It also had the most effective theatrical image of the entire play and production: a little kerosene lamp flickering to life and illuminating (with a little help from Matt Marshall’s lighting trickling through the gaps in Zoe Atkinson’s rafters) a divided working-class family gathered around a kitchen table, along with all their flickering hopes, fears and desires, like a Georges de La Tour nativity scene. The play could easily have segued from there to the Middle East and then London (and even back to the Middle East and finally Cornwall) without any time-jumps, implausible plotting, wooden dialogue or cardboard characters. I’d be curious to see that play; in the meantime, surely there’s a whole world of vastly superior international and local playwriting for Black Swan State Theatre Company to choose from. 

 

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Oil was at the Heath Ledger Theatre from 5 to 27 November.

 

D*ck Pics in the Garden of Eden was at Subiaco Theatre Centre from 16 November to 3 December.

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer, critic and non-conceptual artist based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born in Flügelhorn, a small town in Upper Austria, in 1963. He left Austria and went into voluntary exile in 2000 after the election of the far-right coalition federal government. He is currently editor of the Zeitschrift für Unsozialforschung (Journal of Anti-Social Research) and Emeritus Professor at the University of Lower Flügelhorn where he holds a chair (remotely) in Paranormal Phenomenology while engaging his core muscles for two minutes every day. He is the author of several monographs including Unlogische Untersuchungen (Illogical Investigations), Unzeitlich Sein (Not Being On Time) and Wahnsinn und Methode (Madness and Method), all of which have been translated into English by his friend and colleague Humphrey Bower but none of which has yet been published in any language.