Intimate Apparel by Michael Dalley, Sept 26, 2007

Intimate Apparel by Michael Dalley

By High Performance Company

dante's Gallery, Gertrude St. Fitzroy

Sept 26 to Oct 1, 2007

Reviewer: Kate Herbert on Sept 26, 2007

Intimate Apparel, by Michael Dalley, is inventive, intelligent and very entertaining cabaret. 

Through original songs and characterisation Dalley and Paul McCarthy viciously satirise the obsessions and vanities of performing artists and the recent absurd trends in arts funding. Dalley’s lyrics are clever, almost Tom Lehrer in style.

Dalley and McCarthy, accompanied on keyboard by Will Poskitt, play self-proclaimed avant-garde performers both called Kevin. If you were ever bored senseless, affronted or enraged by appalling theatre, the lyrics of their title song will tickle you. “Please don’t let it be dreadful,” they sing, momentarily inhabiting the role of the fearful and jaded audience (or critic?) facing yet another contemporary performance debacle.

The Kevins pompously preach about theatre and reminisce about their past attempts to obtain funding. In one song they echo the sentiments of all fringe artists when they agonise, “How do you engage the paying public?”

They conceitedly recall their artistic heyday when they were “all identically unique” in, God We Were Amazing In The 80s. They studied in Poland with a student of a student of the famous Grotowski, the director who coined the term Poor Theatre, a label that sadly applies - in a different context - to much of contemporary theatre.

The Kevins jumped on every bandwagon. In the 90s they discovered Asian Theatre and even tried feminism. The ballad, Erotic Cabaret Artiste, is an hilarious comment upon the new burlesque. “She’s so boring,” they sing.

A barbed attack is saved for ex-footballers who decide to be motivational speakers. In What’s Your Story? two old footy players, “Don’t need to be psychiatrists – we played football.” Nina Reactionary Ballerina gives a poisonous serve to a mean-spirited, racist, ballet dancer from Murrumbeena.

They pounced like cats on political gay performance in Nobody Queer Wants To Watch My Queer Performance Art. Theatre as therapy for the mentally ill or socially deprived receives a whacking in Will You Still Love Me Despite My Lack of Spatial Awareness? Everybody is incorporating clown and mediocre circus skills to transform the disadvantaged and annoying.

In their final revelatory moment the Kevins realise that, to please the public, they can revert to an old standard. It’s A Musical, they sing joyfully. Even a crummy one will bring out the payers.

Intimate Apparel is a little gem with clever songs, slick performances and incisive observations about the ill-health of the performing arts in Oz.

By Kate Herbert