What’s Yours Is Mine

Here is an ambitious show, jam-packed to bursting with satirical ideas about Australia, about land and ownership, about racism, Pauline Hansen, plastic, consumerism, sexism… 

Millie (Simone French) works (temporarily) at Toys R Us, but just loves working with children because, well, because…they’re just so…  You know.  Syd (Tom Halls) has just joined a commune on a farm, turned vegan and is thinking of travelling to the Centre.   Ollie (Hayden Burke) is a cheesy, bright’n’breezy ‘TV host’ on inane quiz and variety shows.  They all knew each other once, but now can scarcely remember each other’s names.  Nevertheless (and having nothing better to do) Millie and Ollie invite themselves along on Syd’s spiritual journey.  Syd’s plan is to walk, but Ollie supplies ‘one of [his] cars’ and off they go.  Thus the promising framing device for the show – which proves less and less relevant as things go on.

The creator/performers give us three contemporary Gen Y types – clearly the result of sharp observation and honed by their acting talents.  Their movement skills – as they, for instance, mime driving, falling asleep at the wheel, and crashing – are especially impressive.  (All three are VCA graduates trained by Rinske Ginsberg.)  Simone French’s Millie is a completely recognisable creation: gawky, panicky, empty-headed, embarrassed that her life isn’t going as well as she’d wish, but so desperate to be liked that she’s grating.  Tom Hall’s Syd is the coolly irrational counter-culture guy, whose pronouncements are boldly meaningless, but with a not so surprising raging rage beneath.  Hayden’s Burke’s Ollie is a smooth, over-confident, ever-smiling kind of guy whom we suspect is totally hollow and probably lonely.  It’s perhaps a pity that these characters per se are not developed, allowing us to see – and enjoy – more of them as an equally pertinent comment on Australia today.  But, of course, as the show branches from the road trip into quiz shows, dance numbers, audience interaction, wolves and a road kill koala, etc., each of these actors is called upon to project other personas.  

Despite their unflagging energy, the whole thing begins to feel, unfortunately, a bit hit and miss as it jumps from one sketch to the next.  There are just too many ideas for a seventy-five minute show.  The structure is arbitrary – as if there were this or that item they all loved and wanted to include, but didn’t quite know where to put it.  Why director Yvonne Virsik allowed them to get away with this, I don’t know.  Perhaps because she too was a collaborator on the content and was as seduced by the ‘ideas’ and the razzle-dazzle of the cast. 

Some of the sketches are brilliant – e.g. a most disturbing indeed chilling interlude in which Ms French stands on an elevated platform while Mr Burke and Mr Halls, both in wolf masks, direct every minute aspect of her demeanour and posture in the most blatantly sexist manner.   Or the all too brief Pauline Hansen moment, signalled by a red bottlebrush headdress.  On the other hand, there is the strained section where the cast hand out packets of dirt to the audience to demonstrate how meaningless it is to ‘own’ land.  The show reaches its nadir when Ms French, as that road kill koala, lectures the audience on the menace of plastic, how it kills wildlife and so on – a serious subject but delivered as a finger wagging sermon, and as if the koala is a comic figure…  This loses a puzzled and uncomfortable audience.  The cast has to work hard to get them back and I’m not sure, past this point, as they move on to an extended sketch about the provenance of the Chiko Roll, that they do.  An unfortunate demonstration of talented people not doing what they do best, which I’d say is suggesting ideas rather than baldly stating them.

Michael Brindley

images: Theresa Harrison Photography