by Seduction Opera
at Beckett Theatre until October 28,
2000
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
"If music be the food of love
play on,'" said Duke Orsino in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Seduction
Opera's show, Food of Love, is a peculiar but satisfying miscellany of music,
food art and political comedy.
It is an
effective collision of three artists who work virtually independently on stage:
actor/singer, Jan Friedl, political comedian, Rod Quantock and classical
pianist, James Voss playing Bach's Partita no 4 in D.
Director,
Brian Lipson, cleverly and often wittily weaves the three discrete components
into a cohesive if not always coherent whole.
The
piece opens with Friedl lying in her white pyjamas on a double bed under beams
of stark white light. She talks to us about food, her childhood, her musical
history, her parents, dreams, teaching and students.
It is a disconnected and dislocated stream of
consciousness rave that bears little direct relation to Quantock's part of the
show.
Light
and fascinating and evocative slides of the galaxy designed by Jens Milbret and
other images, spill across her as she drapes herself upon the now upright bed.
Quantock's
comic pratings are a continuation of his stream of invective directed toward
the incompetence and cowardice of the Howard government and the uglification of
the architecture of the city of Melbourne.
In
addition to his architecture lecture, he gives a coherent and informative and
funny lecture-demonstration of Pythagoras' Theorem of triangles, irrational
numbers and the structure of musical notation. How he gets gags out of these is
a mystery but he does.
Throughout
these two intermingled raves, a laconic Voss moves from grand piano, where he
plays Bach with exceptional virtuosity - then he prepares and eats a cheese
sandwich or orders a pizza. All three performers shift, apparently aimlessly,
from bed to telephone to desk, interjecting, cooking toast, making coffee and
eating.
This is
an odd-ball show which is clever, funny moving and musically superb. It is not
a play but a collage of images and ideas that intersect in a novel way.
By Kate
Herbert
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