First and Last Warning
Made and performed by The Sydney Front
The Performance Space, Sydney
Nov 19 to Dec 6
Reviewed by Karen Fredericks
The publicity material for this "theatre work" proclaimed "... the audience is divided. Those who can afford it are escorted to their private viewing area to be served champagne and smoked salmon throughout the show. The rest risk the edges of the performance space, clad only in black lingerie".
Sure, I thought to myself cynically, this may be Sydney... the big smoke... but no-one's going to get a whole theatre audience into black lingerie...are they? Its just a publicity beat up, isn't it?
But it wasn't. To my Brisbane-bred horror I discovered that my press passes entitled my housemate and I to "plebs" tickets (first class tickets cost $40) and, as warned, we were issued regulation black slips and directed to remove our other clothes and place them in the brown paper bags provided. Women were directed through one door and men through another. I grew increasingly thankful that I had brought my housemate, and not my mum, to this particular "play".
Clad only in our nylon slips the women huddled close to a long wall facing a red curtain. Suddenly the curtain dropped, to the accompaniment of loud and stirring music, and harsh lights fell upon us and upon nearly a hundred equally nervous looking, black petticoat wearing men on the opposite side of the room. The women laughed. The men didn't.
That, for me, was the highlight of the evening. It was a truly bizzare and, once you got used to it, entertaining, experience to be in a large room with hundreds of theatre-goers in their underwear. As it was opening night there were even a few famous people in the audience (if you could call it an audience) who I recognised from the telly. The sleazy lingerie became the great leveller.
The Sydney Front's John Bayliss has said that the company makes use of the one thing live theatre has got going for it: "sweaty bodies all together in the one space." First and Last Warning does this extremely well. One cannot help but be affected by one's physical location, in and amongst the performance, in one's smalls.
The four performers, clad identically to the audience, perform a series of mimes, soliloquies and tableaux which culminate in the building of a huge wall, in front of the box seat occupied by the champagne quaffers, from cardboard boxes. Gradually the audience are drawn in to assist with the endeavour, until the whole performance space is alive with the plebs organising themselves, like an army of worker ants, to construct the wall. Men and Women, who have been separated by the initial sex segregation, are finally reunited but interestingly, I observed, they mainly drift back to their respective zones when the wall is completed.
My housemate advises the piece was a theoretically-grounded, postmodernist construction (or is that de-construction?) designed to unravel the nature of theatre, gender, observation and some other . I felt like I was the subject of a psychological experiment, devised by David Lynch for his own crooked entertainment, with no discernible thesis or theorem at its foundation.
I enjoyed it in much the same way you enjoy a "house of horrors" or "tunnel of love" at a funpark. In the end it didn't mean much to me, but its given me a good story to tell when I go home to Brisbane at Christmas. I'd recommend it, but only if you're feeling adventurous.