Grand Theft Theatre

Pony Cam and David Williams
Latvian Hall ‘Tālava’, Wayville
Adelaide Festival

Reviewed by Wolfgang von Flügelhorn

Theatre and live performance have a dual ontology. They exist in the medium of presence – here and now, in this venue, for this duration of time; yet they have an afterlife in memory. They also have a certain duality insofar as they’re both collective and individual forms of experience. I see a show as a member of an audience who shares this experience; yet I also see it from my own perspective, with my own subjective baggage. Finally, I remember it from yet another vantage-point – perhaps differently each time I do so.

 

Most performances are also a representation of something absent: a plot with an imaginary setting, characters and events; or more broadly some kind of performance-text, in the form of a script or score. One might even argue that every performance is shadowed by a kind of Platonic ideal of the work itself: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or Pina Bausch’s choreography exist in a kind of eternal presence (or perhaps eternal absence) beyond any individual performance. 

 

Grand Theft Theatre (which was originally commissioned and performed for Melbourne Fringe in 2022) is both a homage to and playful deconstruction of these various dualities. Over the space of an hour and 55 minutes (broken up by three 6-minute intervals), the five members of Melbourne-based collective Pony Cam and collaborator David Williams (former founder of version 1.0 and now artistic director of Alternative Facts) remember and re-enact moments from performances they’ve seen that have had a formative impact on them as audience-members and artists. 

 

Their memories are necessarily partial and unreliable; the re-enactments even more so. There’s much clowning and lo-fi staging, as well as impressive displays of physical skill, moments of pathos and images of beauty (and occasional horror). The show is as much about the failure of representation as it is about the works themselves.

 

On arrival, audience-members are asked to write their own favourite shows on sticky labels; these become talking-points with fellow audience-members during each of the intervals. This generates a sense of appropriately ephemeral community not only amongst the audience but between the audience and the performers. 

 

The community hall setting adds to this non-hierarchical ambience, as does the minimalism and deliberate messiness of the staging. We’re asked to position our own individual plastic chairs (each of which has the name of a well-known or lesser-known theatre-maker attached to it, also written on a sticky label) wherever we choose in the space; these are then moved into new configurations by the performers during each of the intervals. Props, lighting and sound cues are minimal and functional. The performers wear rehearsal clothes (which get progressively more stained during the show); the set is the space itself. 

 

The aesthetics and underlying politics of the work and its makers are influenced by similarly collaborative experimental ‘post-dramatic’ theatre groups like the UK’s Forced Entertainment (whose work is ‘remembered’ by Williams during the performance) or the British-German collective Gob Squad (whose influence is acknowledged in the program). However, you don’t need to be ‘in the know’ about these (or other) theatrical or artistic references to enjoy the show. The overall approach is light-hearted and (in every sense) accessible; as such it also belongs to a more specifically Australian ‘larrikin’ tradition of comedy, circus and physical theatre.

 

Like the material that’s being remembered and re-enacted (which ranges from high-art to popular, mainstage to fringe, international to local) there are high-points and longueurs; no doubt everyone in the audience responded to different sections in different ways (as my conversations with strangers about their own favourite shows during the intervals would seem to suggest).

 

The concept is so rich I found myself wishing for more diversity in the age of the performers (who are mostly in their twenties, except for Williams, who I would guess is in his forties) and the era in which they had most of their formative theatrical experiences (the early 2000s). I also couldn’t help wondering if some of the audience’s favourite theatre memories couldn’t have been communally shared and then spontaneously re-enacted by the performers as well, to broaden the range and break down the hierarchy between performers and audience even further.

In the end, there’s something beautiful about the evanescence of theatre and performance, as well as the unrepeatability of all experience, and even the unreliability of language and memory. This sense of beauty lingers after the show is over, in all its imperfections – like life itself. 

 

In the words of the Elvis song that ends the show and aptly describes all our favourite theatre memories: ‘Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go. / You have made my life complete, and I love you so.’

 

*

Wolfgang von Flügelhorn is a writer and critic based in Perth, Western Australia. He was born 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. 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. 

 

Professor von Flügelhorn 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 also 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.