Review: The Long Pigs

The Long Pigs
14 March 2014
fortyfive downstairs
to 23 March
fortyfivedownstairs.com

Coulrophobia: fear of clowns. If you've never been scared of clowns and their silly red noses, you will be by the end of The Long Pigs.

Rejected and broken by their own kind, the three long pigs (from the Melanesian Pidgin for "human flesh") are so bitterly dark and absurdly hilarious that you'll never be able to look at a fake red nose again without breaking out in a sweat or gagging.

Clare Bartholomew (Circus Oz, Die Roten Punkte and lots more), Derek Ives (Rock 'n' Roll Circus, The Candy Butchers and lots more) and Nicci Wilks (La Fura Del Baus, CIRCA and lots more) are the three pigs: This, That and The Other Pig. They're filthy and play in a rank mire of intimidation, mistrust and can't-wash-it-off evil.

With ever-wonderful director Susie Dee, these traditionally-trained clowns put their hands down the throats of glittery-rainbow red-nosed clowns, turn them inside out and cut their guts out from the outside – with a blunt rusty knife.

And with the design team of Anna Tregloan (set and costumes), Andy Turner (lights) and Jethro Wooward (composition and sound) turning fortyfive downstairs into the cesspit factory where the clowns-gone-bad prepare and perform, the only thing more frightening than the clowns is the temptation to join them and roll around with them in the blood.

Be tempted. The macabre doesn't get more gloriously funny.

This was on AussieTheatre.

Photo by Ponch Hawkes

Review: Tooth and Nail

Tooth and Nail
The Candy Butchers
12 March 2010
La Mama

The next time I think there’s no room in my brain for a spectacular thought, I’m going to remember that The Candy Butchers found room in La Mama for a double trapeze and a tissue routine.

Azaria Universe and Jess Love were a fingernail’s length away from bruises, but their aerial work is still as awesome as any flown in big tops.

In Tooth and Nail, The Candy Butchers join Finucane and Smith’s delectable Salon de Dance and the droolable Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina to make a March visit to La Mama even more scrumptious, outrageous and unnerving.

The Candy Butchers recreate old-time circus, but never forget that circuses were once the only place that freaks could feel at home. This is circus for grown ups with the kind of clowning that make us understand why some youngsters are terrified of clowns.

While not as bloody as Love’s recent The Little One Said (soon at Melbourne's Comedy Festival), Tooth and Nail continues the Butcher’s slightly macabre look at what goes wrong in circus.

Azaria and Jess bicker over routines that Azaria can’t get right, but Azaria gets a pair of Jess’s tights for her collection and Jess unwittingly exposes herself every time she walks through a door. And Derek Ives... I’m not sure what Derek was up to, but he supplied title’s tooth gag (and rigged the room so the girls could fly).

For all its absurd weirdness, acrobatic wonderfulness and satirical hilarity, Tooth and Nail could do with an extra hammer bang to fix the wobbly narrative. The final scenes are gorgeous because they are so oddly disconnected from the rest of the show, but the nature of an audience is to try to make connections with what has gone before and look for story patterns that may or may not exist.

But narrative consistency is about as important as the pips in a toffee apple. Tooth and Nail is nostalgic, juicy and a perfect combination of tooth-rotting bad and keep-the-doctor-away good. So leave any expectations at home and take a jaw breaking bite.

This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com