Review: Super Discount

Super Discount
Back to Back Theatre, Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre
15 November
Merlyn Theatre, Coopers Malthouse
to 1 December
malthousetheatre.com.au

Back to Back Theatre are the superheroes of Melbourne theatre who leave us wanting to wear our undies on the outside, don a sexy cape and do something that leaves someone else feeling better every day.

 Super Discount began because ensemble member Brian Tilley is obsessed with superheroes: those outsiders who hide from society and are only admired when their difference is on display.

With director Bruce Gladwin, the company developed a show about good and evil, where they start by deciding who gets to play Mark Deans's gold-caped super hero, who mostly prefers to be quiet. With Simon Laherty, Scott Price and Sarah Mainwaring making the decision, Brian thinks it should be him because he understands superheroes and intellectual disability, but David Woods (non-company member, but regular guest) puts himself forward because he can act disabled and should therefore be equally considered – especially because he might be more convincing.

Cringing? Uncomfortable? Hell, yeah!

Formed in 1987, Back to Back is based in Geelong and is the only company in Victoria with an ensemble of full-time of actors, who are all perceived to have an intellectual disability. They've toured the world, won piles of awards and part of their artistic rationale is to "create theatre to challenge the gods".

They rock in all the great ways and continue to confront latent prejudices and assumptions about disability and heroism with theatre that bites with sharpened teeth, but only hurts because you've laughed so hard.

This was on AussieTheatre.com.

MIAF review: Ganesh Versus the Third Reich

MIAF 2011
Ganesh Versus the Third Reich
Malthouse There and Melbourne Festival and Back to Back Theatre
29 September 2011
Merlyn Theatre
to 9 October

Should we only tell our stories? Is it possible to balance the line between respect and offence? With a hullaballoo playing out in the media about how this show is offending some "Melbourne taxpayers", it's probably best to see Ganesh Versus the Third Reich to make up your own mind.

When the Back to Back ensemble conceived the "great conceit" of Ganesh travelling to nazi Germany to reclaim the swastika,  they knew it was "morally fraught ... and too dangerous for a little theatre company from Geelong to appropriate Hindu gods and create a fairytale within the Holocaust."

Thankfully, they re-thought and created a story within a story that blurs reality and fiction as it confronts itself and manipulates its audience's assumptions.

Devised by Mark Deans, Marcia Ferguson, Bruce Gladwin, Simon Laherty, Sarah Mainwaring, Scott Price, Kate Sulan, Brian Tilley and David Woods,  the telling takes us into the rehearsal room as the cast (Deans, Laherty, Price and Tilley) deal with a difficult director (Woods) and argue dilemmas like if it's ok to play a Jew if you're not a Jew or an Indian deity if you're not an India deity. And there's the issue of who's going to play the "good part" of Hitler.

Meanwhile, Ganesh arrives in a concentration camp in 1943, where his elephant-head draws the attention of Mengele, and he meets Levi, whose mental retardation has kept him alive.

If you're going to be offended this work, be offended by yourself as you realise that you came into the theatre with some pre-conceptions and ideas that are offensive to others.

Ganesh Versus the Third Reich is theatre that grabs us by our hearts, gives us permission to laugh, makes us cry, shakes some sense into us, then starts the process again. What an astonishing start to MIAF 2011.

Photo by Jeff Busby

This review originally appeared on AussieTheatre.com