by Tim Robertson
La Mama at The
Courthouse until May 17, 1997
Reviewed by Kate
Herbert round May 5, 1997
Tim Robertson's play
Mary Shelley and the Monsters is messy but funny. It was written in the
hey-day of the Pram Factory and has the chaotic scent of Melbourne's theatre in
the 70's. Occasionally the dialogue sounds glib and arch but the play did,
after all, emerge from a period of lefty, intellectual smart-arse theatre.
The title is deceptive. Mary (Helen Hopkins) is not really
the focus of the play. Rather it is the men in and around her life, her monsters
according to Robertson, who have centre stage.
Her father, philosopher William Godwin (Jim Daly) is a grotesque old vulgarian who
studies his excreta. Her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, " writes like an
angel, looks like a twerp". His poetic pal, the club-footed Lord Byron,
(John F Howard) sings the Byronic Blues and quips, "gotta put my foot
up."
Clayden and his jaunty cast have had a hoot creating a
wildly entertaining show. They make the most of Robertson's poorly structured
text that is essentially a collection of scenic reflections on the Romantics
with lateral links between scenes.
The style is, appropriately, absurd and black with some
cleverly devised physical comedy routines such as a journey by Italian donkey
during which the donkey ends up riding Shelley. Howard's Byron is sexily
lugubrious and Jerome Pride in a minor role as John Clare is compelling. Jim
Daly plays a series of unremittingly hilarious characters. His Italian youth's
seduction of Byron is a scream.
Music is an essential component in the play and is composed
by pianist Briony Marks and played by a trio including guitar and violin. It is
Brechtian-Berlin cabaret in both musical and theatrical style and is rather
erratically strewn throughout in snatches of verses or full chorus numbers.
Clayden's design magically transforms the normally dour
Courthouse Theatre with enormous drops of cheesecloth - very 70's. This
curtaining provides an oversized screen for projection of fragmented images
from Italian paintings and pallazzi which accentuate the other-worldliness of
these Romantic poets.
Death is a continuing theme in both the play and the
Shelleys' lives. Mary says, "To examine life I must first have recourse to
death": hence her obsession with the dead and the monstrous in Frankenstein.
Robertson's play emphasises this indulgence in the funereal by visiting charnel
houses, portrait galleries of the dead. Even John Major was amongst the dead on
election night.
KATE HERBERT
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