COMEDY /THEATRE
Devised & created by Adrienne Truscott & Le Gateau Chocolat (UK/USA)
At Malthouse Theatre, Beckett until 16 April 2023
Melbourne International Comedy Festival
Reviewer: Kate Herbert
Stars:**** (4)
This review is published only on this blog. I’ll present a radio review on Arts Weekly, 3MBS, on Sat 15 April 2023. KH
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| Le Gateau Chocolat, Adrienne Truscottin Grey Arias, photo by Tamarah Scott |
Take a grab bag of explosive social issues, a plus-size, gay, black, English-Nigerian, operatic drag diva (Le Gateau Chocolat) and a cis, white, female feminist, comedian and performance artist from the US (Adrienne Truscott), then whack them into a blender with Madama Butterfly, and you have Grey Arias.
Gateau and Truscott are magnetic and charismatic in totally different ways. Their on-stage personae and differing performance styles manage to both collide and complement each other, resulting in one astounding and bizarre duo.
They are friends and award-winning artistes in their own right. Both walk a fine line between provocative and offensive, and audiences that don’t know their work may feel affronted, shocked or just plain confused. The show’s content is confrontational, transgressive and insightful while their performance style is casual and chaotic yet, paradoxically, still finely tuned and complex.
The glorious music and questionable narrative of Madama Butterfly are threaded throughout Grey Arias. The beauty of Puccini’s score becomes tainted as Gateau characterises the central character, Cho Cho San, as a 15-year-old rape victim. ‘Why do they perform it?” Truscott demands. ‘Because the music is so beautiful,’ replies Gateau, simply and unemotionally.
Their interactions are oppositional, riddled with intentionally unanswerable rhetorical questions and political ‘grey areas’. They shift between comic banter and political debate. At times, their dialogue resembles a philosophical, almost Socratic argument, with Gateau playing the teacher with Truscott the wide-eyed pupil at his knee. There is definitely a status difference between them in this performance, particularly when Gateau challenges Truscott about casual racism.
They set traps for each other; Gateau relishes seeing Truscott squirm when she crosses his blurred lines about gender, race and plenty of other issues. Meanwhile, audience members search their conscience and memory for their own instances of casual racism and other deviations from political correctness in this period of Wokeness.
There are frequent triggers for both performers and trigger warnings for the audience. They each confess personal experiences of rape, challenge each other and the audience with references to racism, both casual and overt, nudity, childhood dreams, musicals and operas (Truscott confuses the two to great hilarity).
Gateau, dressed in kimono and wild wig, entertains us with operatic arias and snippets of pop songs and, despite Gateau persistently stopping her singing, Truscott finally gets her chance to play Annie singing Tomorrow, a childhood dream of which she was cheated many decades ago.
A witty, revealing and eccentric visual element is the rear projection of the pair’s text messages to each other, that expose their burgeoning ideas and disagreements about this show and even their communications and thoughts during the performance.
This extraordinary collision of Gateau and Truscott in Grey Arias is brazen, audacious, mischievous and not to be missed.
by Kate Herbert
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