The Waiting Room

The Dog Theatre and Dancing Dog Café is charming oasis right in amongst the huge inner west diversity of Footscray. This very popular venue was the “Winner of Best Venue: Melbourne Fringe Festival Awards 2009” and is presenting ‘A Menu of Physical & Visual Theatre’ for this years Fringe. A rich and interesting selection curated by Peta Hanrahan.

One of the first of these offerings, The Waiting Room, you will love if you delight, as I do, in watching adults perform with the commitment and focus of wholeheartedly engrossed children. These consummate performers entrance, beguile and transport with subtle yet acute skills of expressive communication.

The audience is immediately engaged by the troupe’s entrance. It is so much fun unashamedly observing people do what one has just done. Watching each other, monitoring oneself and watching and engaging with, or hoping not to engage with, the performers, highlights a sense of community and is fun.

The work unfolds with quirky self-deprecating humour and moves lyrically through various aspects of tribal behaviour with shifting degrees of surreal ambiguity - like a kind of physicalized sub-text that makes no sense yet is full of meaning.

Wordless, but using voice, and beautifully guided and supported by sound and music from the deft hands of Michael Havir, all comes to an end in a hypnotic exhaustion for the performers. This left me questioning whether audiences require or even want their performers to express extreme generosity in expending all energy. I would have ‘loved them more’ if the show had been ten minutes shorter.

These practitioners make perfect sense of what Physical Theatre is because they have worked with, developed and honed their own ‘brand’ of it over the past two decades. The Waiting Room is a performance of tremendous integrity.

Suzanne Sandow