Oedipus Schmoedipus

Oedipus Schmoedipus
By post. Belvoir. January 9 – February 2, 2014.

This sassy female trio of theatre deconstructionists, called post, promises much but delivers little. They are left victims to their own spin and our over-stimulated expectations.

Who wouldn’t relish their take on the great deaths of literary history, the profound climaxes, the last tender, bloody moments – without the boring bits - from Aeschylus, Chekhov, Euripides, Gogol, Ibsen, Marlowe, Moliere, Pirandello, Racine, Seneca, Shakespeare, Strindberg, Wedekind, Wilde and many more? These girls could surely bring some sharp wit and wisdom to exploring how all these dead white males – these Great Whites, as they call them – have captured that levelling experience of death which awaits us all.

Writers, directors and performers Zoë Coombs Marr and Mish Grigor (Natalie Rose is the third writer) begin with the most shocking eight minutes of violence perhaps ever seen on the Belvoir stage. Their white clothing is soon saturated with spurting blood as they enact every conceivable way to kill each other, to the surging sound of Eminem and Rihanna’s Love the Way You Lie (We’ll later remember the operatic/classical/pop mix from sound designer James Brown as the best part of this mad show).

What follows, after a bloody mopping up by stagehands, is a banal and schoolgirlish run of word associations around death, with only occasional amusement from Coombs Marr’s laconic country girl bravado. Thankfully they’re soon upstaged by the entrance of 25 ordinary folk, volunteers who are coached before each show just a few hours earlier, taking their words and movement cues from overhead monitors, and reciting the lines of the dying from the classics. Stepping over the stage corpse, they later chant and dance in rough unison and parade in outlandish costumes, at one point clustering awkwardly in a strangely hilarious ghost scene, decked in sheets with peepholes.

The show slips away into mindless silliness but at least these volunteers, in all their unpracticed normality, bring an empathy to the universal experience that, yes, each and all of us must at some time face death.

Sadly, this is the only insight amongst the ridiculous and, our expectations denied, the enormous literary cannon on the mysteries of death is left completely untouched.

Martin Portus

Image: Mish Grigor & Zoe Coombs Marr with volunteers: Photographer: Ellis Parrinder

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