MIAF 2008
Appetite
Kage
24 October 2008
Fairfax Studio, The Arts Centre
The lesson I learnt from Appetite is: Never have a performer dry hump a whole roast suckling-pig while your protagonist is pouring out her heart and soul.
With an artistic pedigree including director Kate Denborough, writer Ross Mueller, performer Catherine McClements; a long development process; and the support of MIAF and the Arts Centre, I expected Appetite to be the kind of work that would take these Melbourne-based creatives to the world.
Fusing physical theatre/dance with drama and music, it’s about 39-year-old Louise, who is struggling with aging, realising she’s a middle class urban cliché and wondering what happened to her youthful aspirations. This should have spoken to me (and most of the assembled audience) and left me a blubbering mess of self-recognition, empathy and inspiration.
Instead, I thought that the Emperor, the Empress and all the assembled court were all starkers.
There were some beautiful and remarkable moments. Denborough’s captivating dance pieces were physically inventive and showed us everything we needed to know about the characters and their relationships. McClements has never failed to engage me on a stage, and her performance was the best it could be. But the good bits just made the less-good bits seem even worse.
I thought Appetite was under-written, under-directed, and filled with middle-class clichés and one dimensional characters. Louise’s middle class existence has become so middle class that she has everything she could ever need – but having family, friends, material excess, and a husband-who-turns-down-her-hot-sister all suck in her mind. She wants her life to have meaning and “remember how to smile”. So she miserably wanders like a ghost around her party, as her mates get pissed and behave like teenagers on schoolies week.
We learnt nothing about her that we didn’t know from the first scene. Nothing surprised me, moved me or made me care. As Mueller writes superbly about loss and discontent, I kept waiting for her to lose something. Instead, her wealthy, good-looking hubby declares that he loves her and that they will embark on a “life like we are falling in love every day”. I’m afraid that we were meant to believe this – however nothing on that stage made me believe that he loved her and their party behaviour indicated that they would wake up hung over, and conveniently forget their drunken late-night promises.
Appetite obviously embraces food and hunger as metaphor, but it seemed to be used more for its joke value than its symbolism. (And it is unfortunate that it is on the same week as flour and bread are used so perfectly in OKS’s Romeo and Juliet). Louise’s character climax revolves around two monologues that might have been the most incredibly written and life changing words every uttered - but I couldn’t hear them because the audience were too busy laughing at the physical action. I can see how this was an ironic comic counterpoint to her revelation, but all it did was distract. The distractions were fabulously funny and perfectly executed – but nothing can compete with simulated sex with a roasted whole pig.
If Appetite was satire, I think it would have struck a stronger chord. I searched the program notes for a hint that it was meant to be funny, but it’s about Louise being “inspired to change”. Perhaps I just didn’t see what inspired her.
This review appeared on AussieThearte.com
