by Julia Britton
Melbourne Town Hall
until March 16, 1997
Reviewed by Kate
Herbert around March 7 1997
The jury is out. We
are now officially completely unshockable. In the face of onstage nipple
piercing, rape fantasies, suggestions of incest and most prominently,
flagellation, our pulse rates continue to drop. The boredom quotient even of
whipping has gone sky high.
Perhaps it is my perception but it seems that sado-masochism
is being done to death recently. The life of Melbourne-born pianist and
composer Percy Grainger may have been lived early this century but his
well-documented aberrant sexual behaviour is very fashionable in nightclubs,
fancy dress, video clips and fashion shoots. Are the middle-class so bored?
This two-hour solo is performed valiantly by Shawn Unsworth
who struggles with an unwieldy, over-long and over-written text. It is
essentially an informational monologue that must then be performed as
self-narration with occasional scenes in which Unsworth plays Rose and other
and other characters.
The location in the opulent Melbourne City Council Chambers
was the site of one of Percy's early concerts.
The problem is that the grandeur of the room is in danger of
overwhelming the production altogether.
Unsworth is almost perpetually in motion, dressing and
undressing, whipping or being whipped. However, most of the time he is trapped
behind the huge mayoral table or on top of a grand piano set against the back
wall. This makes the whole performance physically inaccessible and the
performer himself uncomfortable with an edge of desperation and breathlessness
in the first half and he is unaided by such dense and wordy text which lacks
any dramatic tension.
It is astonishing that such an eccentric and perverse life
can be made to seem banal. Percy Grainger was evidently a charming rogue. A
chronology of his life with occasional bouts of flagellation (Did I mention the
whipping?) does not constitute good drama.
KATE HERBERT
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