The Crass Motor Show
Keep Left Theatre
February 18-28, Victorian Trades Hall, Carlton
$15/$10
Book on (03) 9489 1096 or visit <http://www.theatre.keep-left.org>.
REVIEW BY SARAH STEPHEN & JULIE SMITH
MELBOURNE — The Crass Motor Show is a comedy and musical by Melbourne's Keep Left Theatre. It's being held in February to mark 100 years of the Ford Motor company, which was founded in 1903 and established in Australia since 1923.
It is based on the story of Henry Ford. A noted union basher, Ford was anti-Jewish and an admirer of Hitler. "Henry Crass has all these attributes and more, and they make for a great comedy with catchy tunes and a top cast of 16 players", explains the play's writer Chris Gaffney. "The Crass Motor Show is more than a history of Ford; it could be any corporation told through a thousand theatrical devices, lots of laughs and songs."
The play "may well prove to be controversial because it tells the truth about the actions of certain trade-union leaders in the period of the [1983-96] Australian Prices and Incomes] Accord, always awash with humour and send-up", Gaffney explained.
"Theatre can show truth about our society in a way a lecture or a newspaper cannot", Gaffney pointed out. "If it can appeal to people on a level which is not just intellectual, it can change the way people look at the world."
Kept Left Theatre began as the rapid-response team of Melbourne Workers Theatre, doing pickets, protests and the like, including at S11, the protest outside the Melbourne World Economic Forum in 2000. The group performed a play called "S11 — the dividing line" a few months later. Within weeks, the MWT executive disbanded the team without explanation.
"We had been unhappy about the recent shows of the MWT and their lack of politics and, in the case of Front, a play about the 1998 struggle on the waterfront, that is was both anti-working class and anti-migrant", Gaffney explained. "Clearly the theatre had lost sight of its own history and was attempting to go commercial. We therefore had to go. Three of us re-formed as KLT in 2001."
From Green Left Weekly, February 4, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.