The Long Pigs
Long pigs? A term used by South Sea island cannibals to describe human meat. That is just one level – or layer – of meaning in this very dark, macabre, laugh-out-loud and brilliantly realised clown show.
Who are the ‘long pigs’ here? The performers, or us, or metaphorically all humanity, ripe for the slaughter?
Even the term ‘clown show’ is misleading. There is slapstick and violence to be sure, but the three clowns here (Clare Bartholomew, Nicci Wilks and Mozes) are not your benign Ronald MacDonald clowns, or the circus kind that tumble out of a tiny car and then squirt water at each other. Nor are they the traditional White Clown and Auguste – although that last perhaps comes closest because these clowns are frightening, threatening, intentionally cruel – and also stupid.
As well as being clowns, they are abattoir workers, armed with knives and choppers, grubby, blood-smeared and sweaty, dressed in filthy grey overalls and aprons, their headgear reminiscent of bouffon characters – and their clown noses are not red but black. So, they are clowns - but also pigs…
Their aim – the thread that runs through the show - is to eliminate all red noses on all other clowns. Another sinister metaphor? The show begins with an elaborate routine of counting red clown noses (what they are takes a while to be clear) and making of that a comic routine involving ladders, ramps, buckets, tins, tubes, shoots, scales, a very small bicycle, a corpse-like doll and some intentionally clunky choreography. The routine is repeated three times and just as we are getting puzzled or even restless – and they are getting weary - we get it. What an exhausting effort it is to be trapped in a role and to be ‘funny’ over and over again…
They discover one red nose is missing. Who is to blame? Not them. In a recurring motif when things go wrong, the clowns suspect the culprit must be someone in the audience and turn on us in a most hostile manner. Folks in the front row shrink back in their seats such is the genuinely fierce and threatening manner of the clowns – Nicci Wilks in particular.
There is not a word of dialogue but the comic precision, the expressive physicality and the vivid facial expressions – especially the way Clare Bartholomew uses her eyes - are inescapably riveting, hilarious and curiously disturbing.
And so the show rolls on, ranging through scurrilous blasphemy, vicious cruelty, betrayal, scapegoating, from one frustrating routine or set piece to another, subtle variations building and building to a sort of Grand Guignol climax… It’s horrible – there are audible gasps and winces from the audience – but you cannot look away because the performances are so beautifully judged, so blackly comic, and so finely directed by Susie Dee one of whose specialities is rendering meaning through physical movement and gesture.
This is, apparently, the fifth iteration of the show. Maybe it is not quite ‘there’ yet. If there is a flaw it lies perhaps in the too rich mix of ideas. Rhythmically the show feels as if it has an ending too many – that is, that it comes to rest… and then goes on. But maybe we should not try so hard to make rational sense of it. That’s an attempt made all the more difficult by the plethora of references, metaphors and allegories confronting us over this intensely dense, exquisitely executed, unrelenting ‘clown show’.
Michael Brindley
Photographer: Aaron Walker
The Long Pigs plays at Theatre Works, St Kilda until 10 December, before playing at the Butter Factory Theatre, Wodonga, as part of Borderville Circus Festival, 13 – 14 December 2023.
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