by After their recent triumphs on the international circuit – winning the 2022 Ibsen award, the Nobel prize for theatre, and the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement in theater at this year’s Venice Biennale – Geelong’s could be forgiven for an aura of identity. Back to Back. congratulations. You could expect something celebratory from them. Instead, they perform Multiple Evils, a work of great complexity and ambiguity, even with pulse morbidity.
Related: Punk and prizes: notes from Australia’s internationally acclaimed neurodiverse theater company
Of course, anyone familiar with the history of this company will know that they don’t go in for a simple reassurance; they were never glib or superficial. They have never shied away from provocation, exploring topics from which other companies might run a mile. As a group of actors who identify as having an intellectual disability or being neurotic, Back to Back continues to create and challenge audience expectations and prejudices. Multiple Bad Things ventures further into treacherous waters, with surprising results.
In some ways, this new work can be seen as a summary of the company’s concerns – there are echoes of past productions, and key themes return. We have discussions about work and physical ability, gender and sexuality, coercion and control. As always with Back to Back, issues of power and agency come into play. But there is also a renewed artistic energy, a deliberate engagement with fresh perspectives. It’s a show that looks behind as you move forward.
Three warehouse workers, two women and a man, navigate different opinions and perspectives as they try to assemble a strange and complex scaffolding. At first, the man (Scott Price) seems content to prop himself up in an inflatable flamingo and let the women do the work. One of them (Sarah Mainwaring) is less in the limelight than the other (Bron Batten), and is more apologetic. She is pleading for physical help, but is ignored.
Batten’s character connects with Mainwaring’s for a while, but takes on more sinister commitments as the play progresses. Dressed in pink (as a reference, according to the program, to Arthur Boyd’s painting, Australian Scapegoat) and posed suggestively around the metallic apparatus, she becomes a figure of chaos and persecution. In any telling moment, she adopts the language of victimhood to make a better victim. She uses the concept of diversity to defend mono-leadership and bullying. It’s a chilling reminder of the ways in which power hides itself for its own ends, and a coded swipe at the harmful language of inclusivity that ironically marginalizes the most vulnerable.
Surrealism and symbolism play a greater role in Multiple Bad Things than in some of the company’s previous productions. The fourth person (Simon Laherty), who sits on the sidelines playing solitaire and watching a computer monitor, seems both detached and dominant: an indifferent god from the machine who also affects the warehouse workers’ lives in strange ways . That plastic flamingo is deflated at one point and worn like an animal skin, recalling the Hindu god from the company’s masterpiece, Ganesh versus the Third Reich. Death comes calling.
Related: Venice Biennale: Australian regional theater company wins Golden Lion
All this makes the piece sound mind-blowing and overblown, but often funny and fun. A brilliant sequence has Mainwaring calling a helpline and discovering that she has recorded an elegant message that veers from bureaucratic indecision to riotous talk and passive aggressiveness. Laherty occasionally manages to grab a bottle of Coke or a box of Cheezels. Even the trigger warning at the beginning feels slyly disrespectful. This tonal instability and the balance of methods, the flip with the deadly serious, speak to the confidence and sophistication of the production.
Technically, it is flawless. Anna Cordingley’s set and costume design is austere and highly positive, bewildering and mechanical in some ways but also able to surprise and transform. That scaffolding seems deliberately cruel and degrading, but it has its secrets and in the end delivers a powerful coup de theatre. Richard Vabre’s lighting design is assured and responsive, and Zoë Barry’s score is darkly evocative.
Performances are rich and exciting. Mainwaring is, as usual, very compassionate and responsive, and seems capable of carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. Price is spiky and frustrated, while Laherty is reluctant and very funny. Batten has a strong influence as the provocateur, puckish and disquieting.
Back-to-back Bad Multiplication sees them at the peak of their skills, both expansive and razor sharp. The show itself is unsettling, often veering into ominous abstraction and menace. The usual refuges of community and friendship seem left out, and the nameless people on stage feel somehow adrift, floating aimlessly on a sea of doubt and confusion. Far from a victory lap, this new expression is more like a cry of despair, agonizing and defiant. Walk in our shoes, they seem to be saying, and see the world as it really is.
-
Back to Back Multiple Bad Things is at Geelong Arts Center until April 13, then Belgium’s Théâtre National Wallonie-Bruxelles May 10 to 12 and Melbourne’s Malthouse theater May 29 to June 9.
