messy, kooky and embracing... disarming and highly enjoyable
Thank You, Thank You Love | Review
MKA. Upstairs at Tuxedo Cat. 17 Wills Street Melbourne – 14 – 28 June 2014
‘Keen as Mustard and Sharp as Paint’ MKA’s HYPRTXTis a great chance to engage with some complex contemporary writing for theatre. If you are after polished flawless production values – don’t even think about it. However if you are prepared to take the risk of being confronted and challenged by energetic, passionate totally underfunded but eternally courageous gifted theatre makers – get to the Tuxedo Cat in the next couple of days and be inspired and soak up the ambiance.
Thank You, Thank You Love by Tobias Manderson-Galvin @ 9.30 pm
Surely every performer knows the fear of dying on stage. Maybe dying in performance could be sort of masochistically addictive as it seems it must have been for Tommy Cooper a stage Magician whose sad demise is quoted as inspiration by Manderson-Galvin for this work of five short plays about dying on stage or, one could say, that die on stage.
Initially seated in a huge haze of fog it is certainly not always clear what is going on or why and that is a good part of the overall charm. It is pretty much up to you to glean meaning where you find it. Some things stand out – but often things don’t seem to match or link up. As the evening progresses not only the fog but everything seems to spill out off the stage.
The suspended state one feels held in could be likened to a type of disjointed arbitrary chaos that creativity can be born/emerge from.
Thank You, Thank You Love is messy, kooky and embracing – funny and fun and actually a great chance for the creator and performers to connect toy and play with an audience. This they do with generosity. It is complex and ambiguous and full of glitches that sometimes seem completely real and unrehearsed or at the very least under-rehearsed. This work is an orgy of chaotic, sometimes realized and sometimes semi realized, ideas with a healthy dash of self-deprecation staged in front of wine soaked curtains.
Whatever. Once one has died on stage and felt the heavy weight of failure surely things can only get better from there.
Performances by Tobias Manderson-Galvin, his sister, Sam Young and Becky Lou Church are all well pitched.
Disarming and highly enjoyable.
Suzanne Sandow