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. 

 

*

 

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.