The Australian – 17 March, 2014 – Chris Boyd

Weird, wonderful game of clowns

IN his memoir, the king of clowns Grock wrote about extracting mirth from nothing and that “the genius of clowning is transforming the little, everyday annoyances … into something strange and terrific.” Angela Carter’s fictional clown king, Buffo, belches and says “bollocks” to Grock’s argument. Buffo reckons “the beauty of clowning is that nothing ever changes”.

And that’s the line this ingenious and maddening show follows. It presents us with a fixed, unchanging clown universe. In this sinister, self-contained world, the rules of logic are utterly alien. Clowning isn’t an occupation, it’s a state of mind. And of being. Between public performances of their well-honed act, three clowns (Clare Bartholomew, Nicci Wilks and Derek Ives) slave away on a sweatshop production line, sorting and packing red noses into cans. Anna Tregloan’s set is like a Rube Goldberg contraption. Even the rules of narrative are flipped. In the world of The Long Pigs, music isn’t incidental or responding to the narrative, it actually is the narrative. Jethro Woodward’s score is extraordinarily agile, as spooky and sprung as the best of Bernard Herrmann. With a dash of Prokofiev for good measure. It’s as if Woodward is bullying the characters and directing stage traffic himself.

While the words in this piece are few, and the tricks are many, this is unquestionably a piece of theatre. The acting stands up to the closest scrutiny. Watching Wilks slowly inhale a chocolate eclair is like witnessing some kind of ritualistic sex act. Ives plays Christ crucified and a Gitmo prisoner in a stress position with a tambourine crown of thorns. Like a lot of the performing in the show, smartly directed by co-deviser Susie Dee, Ives manages to be ambiguous without ever appearing non-committal.

Members of the downtrodden trio take turns bullying each other, forming and reforming into opportunistic gangs and divvying up scraps of food. Especially bananas, as their skins feature in the regular stage acts.

The Long Pigs is juvenile, blasphemous and almost completely inexplicable. But it is probably the most engrossing and satisfying work of physical theatre I’ve seen in the better part of a decade: strange and terrific indeed.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/stage/weird-wonderful-game-of-clowns/story-fn9d344c-1226856252105#