Miss Bosnia, April 30, 1996

Miss Bosnia by Louis Nowra,

Budinski’s Brunswick St Fizroy

Reviewed by Kate Herbert around April 30, 1996

Try to remember the precise moment that Louis Nowra became a gag-meister and not a creator of poetry.

Sure, there were jokes and wacky characters in Louis Nowra's early works, but try to pin-point the precise moment that he became a gag-meister rather than a poetic dramatist. Whenever it was, he seems to have peaked in Miss Bosnia, which is a three-hour, eight-handed stand-up routine set in a war zone.

This is a grotesquely and grossly funny play with exceptional performances. The faultless cast includes a tour-de-force by Genevieve Picot as Mira, the Former Miss Former-Yugoslavia. She brings together six women and - Oops! - one man for a beauty pageant: first prize a trip out of Sarajevo on a U. N. truck with Mira as chaperone.

But war being what it is nothing goes to plan. The generator fails, the band plays Prince medleys, bombs hit the theatre, the general falls in love with a bloke and nobody has leg-wax strips.

The contestants are: a bitter dentist, an exotic sniper (female), a sexy soldier (male), a drunken zookeeper who has a love affair with a lion, a fundamentalist Muslim who wants to be in a Broadway musical, and a beauty has-been whose career has been following the beauty pageant trial.

The gross, often offensively sexist humour is somehow poignant set amongst the ruins of these tragic lives. The tits and bum, dick and fanny jokes are tiring and adolescent but, in some perverse way only Nowra is capable of, the whole remains entertaining - silly and outrageous but hilarious.

It is worth seeing just for the insane talent quest: Peter O'Brien doing a drag dance routine to "Xanadu", Deborah Robertson doing tacky Marilyn, Jane Borghese, a one woman Waiting for Godot. But most gut- wrenchingly absurd and shriekingly funny was Kaarin Fairfax doing crappy ventriloquism with a purple sock. Nikki Wendt's song was the singular moment of real beauty and delicacy.

There are fleeting moments of political commentary but essentially the piece rollicks along relentlessly with little respect for - well really for anything.

The most intense reminder of our mortality and was when Andruszko recklessly waved a rifle only 24 hours after the Port Arthur siege.

KATE HERBERT