the joy of the festival
The Unspoken Word is ‘Joe’ | Review
Kathryn Kelly | RealTime Arts
Issue #118 Dec-Jan, 2013
Brisbane Festival: QUT Theatre Republic, QUT Creative Industries Precinct, 7-28 Sept
MKA
But the joy of the festival is always in getting a look at key interstate shows and this year we got both the Melbourne and Sydney indie darlings of new writing: MKA Theatre of New Writing and Arthur. MKA’s The Unspoken Word is ‘Joe’ by Zoey Dawson is a meta-theatrical satire of the ‘staged reading,’ a sort of inner-city hipster Pirandello tale, as our hapless but malevolent heroine, the playwright, tries to bully, blackmail, seduce and cajole her way through a disastrous reading of her new work, climaxing with her destruction of her own no-budget set and being cradled by the vacuous mid-career director she had dragooned into hosting her ill-fated masterwork. Sort of Lally Katz with a plot, the piece self-consciously linked itself to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in a way I still don’t quite understand, but have very much enjoyed trying to work out.