LIFT's Food Court at The Barbican

LIFT's Food Court at The Barbican

24 June, 2010
by: Ricky PS

Australian theatre company Back to Back theatre ridicule our prejudices with experimental theatre as part of LIFT at The Barbican

Let's just start by saying this is a story about how two women bully, and then nearly kill another woman.

Above the low tinny hum of The Necks jazz collective, two terrifying women in spangly yellow leotards (a pathetically cruel Nicki Holland and a grim, angry Sonia Teuben) are screeching vile, rhythmically stilted accusations of fatness at a slim, mute, nondescript female (Sarah Mainwaring). The text of their insults is projected onto the screen behind them. With delicate comic timing, Mark Deans passes a boom mic under the mouths of each as they speak, or don't – literally amplifying the leotard clad women's meanness and implicitly teasing the girl for her silence. Stage left, Scott Price gives a quiet, melancholy monologue straight out of a Pina Bausch performance.

To some people, that sounds like hell. 'Experimental' theatre doing what it has done for decades, ignored by everyone else. Theatre about theatre; about its artifice, its power dynamics, its voyeurism.

But what if I tell you that the actors are disabled? Holland and Teuben seem both to need a mic in order to be heard, and need the text to be projected above them in order to be understood. The beat of their lines is just a consequence of how difficult they find it to speak. Mainwaring can’t talk, because she just can't. Are the mic, the poetry or the projected words experimental if they're necessary?

And what if I then tell you that these actors are actually much more capable than all that? Holland and Teuben eventually speak with greater fluency than at first they pretend, and the apparently mute Mainwaring can in fact recite Shakespeare. The production is parodying the audience’s assumptions about what its actors can do by indulging our ignorance, and then exploding it. The result is not just that our prejudices are ridiculed and we are left red-faced. The methods of naval-gazing theatre about theatre have become a metaphor for the experience of any patronised minority. 

The Shakespeare bit makes this clear. In a gross, brutal and simple explosion of violence the third, apparently mute woman has been beaten, bludgeoned, and left for dead. The cello strings and cymbal-rattles of The Necks rise yet another few decibels of intensity, and, almost out of nowhere, floating in the music are Caliban’s devastating words from The Tempest, intoned by the 'mute' Mainwaring: "Be not afeard: the isle is full of noises,/ Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not… when I wak'd,/ I cried to dream again."

It's 'about' theatre – about dreaming, and knowing it, and believing in it all the same. But, since Caliban is a cipher for colonial natives, the speech is also a tragic tale of human exploitation, and the fantasies we construct to escape the world. The blurb for the production describes the actors as having 'intellectual disabilities', but this is experimental theatre at its emotionally and intellectually exhausting best.

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Ricky PS