Tradition in search of a future
Children of the Devil
Performed by Russell Dykstra
Directed by David Bell
Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, until June 28
Carlton Courthouse, Melbourne, June 30-July 11
Review by Allen Myers
After the performance, the audience cluster around the notice board, reading reviews and analyses of what they have just seen. This is not because the performance is hard to understand — it isn't — but because it doesn't fit into any familiar category of English-language theatre.
The program notes explain the work's origins in a medieval French custom known as bouffon, in which social outcasts were permitted to return to the city annually and perform vicious parodies of leading dignitaries.
In this format, Russell Dykstra provides a one-hour whirlwind tour de force: harness the energy of the performance, and you could supply electric power for a medium-sized town. In mid-gesture, he passes between four different subjects of parody and two comperes — one of them a dog. Presence, manner, body language, even the shape of his face — all change appropriately and instantly.
This performance is all the more impressive when you realise that the details of it are improvised each night, only the overall structure and the opening and closing of each scene being fixed.
Some will find Children of the Devil too gross: the tone is set at the beginning, when the dog-compere defecates on stage, and trends downhill from there. The deliberately created revulsion is transferred, via savage humour, to the objects of the parody.
The four victims are types rather than specific individuals (presumably they were specific in medieval France): Carmel, an exploitative casting agent; Bevan, a hoon who can't decide whether sex is better with his girlfriend or his car; a born-again Christian fundamentalist, formerly gay former soap salesman; and a pretentious theatrical director.
Some of the scenes are side-splitting; I was particularly taken with the directorial wanker's "Serpent Dreaming Butoh". Dykstra and director David Bell keep a fine balance between laughter and disgust, between the absurd and the abominable: this is a theatrical experience you won't soon forget.
My only concern is that Children might prove to be a one-off wonder: I would love to see a bouffon-style treatment of John Howard, Pauline Hanson, a media magnate or two — the potential targets are many.
Unlike the original bouffon, few in the audience are likely to identify with those parodied: automotive hoons don't go to the theatre, and if any happened to wander by accident into Children, they would beat Dykstra unconscious with a tyre iron.
Could the Dykstra-Bell magic (black magic) survive if directed against targets closer to the hearts of theatre-goers? Our modern "tolerant" society is reluctant to grant licences like that given to the medieval outcasts.