Working with Children

Working with Children
Concept, Text, Direction, Design & Performance by Nicola Gunn. An MTC NEON NEXT commission. Southbank Theatre, The Lawler, Melbourne. 30 August – 29 September, 2018

Nicola Gunn’s show is anti-theatre – which is not to say it is not theatrical or not entertaining.  It is both.  It just works against – or confounds – our expectations.  In fact, for an audience to be completely absorbed by one slight woman in jeans and a T-shirt alone on stage for an hour and fifteen minutes is quite an achievement.  But Working with Children employs other means, which involve the audience in making connections and guessing at meanings rather than those meanings being dramatized. 

She begins in a whole-body rubber cat suit, over all of which she smears lubricant.  The sexual associations are obvious.  But what she does next, she does in the dark.  We can only just make out her sliding on the strip of water she pours onto the stage.  We laugh because it looks like fun, ‘naughty’ fun, but in a wholly different, overturning way from what we might have expected.

Then, as she makes repeated movements that at first appear random, she begins a monologue that at first appears disjointed – even if delivered with a quiet, dry, wry irony and beautifully judged comic timing.  But the monologue circles in on itself, picking up casually dropped remarks, repeating key lines.  Here we find references – the only explicit ones – to the children of the title: a fragmented narrative concerning a television show about teenage sexuality with a panel of teenagers and a panel of ‘experts’ led by a sleazoid named ‘Marten’.  He’s German and an expert.  It’s clear that the teenagers’ naiveté will be exploited and manipulated for the sake of entertainment in the guise of ‘education’.

And the movements – reaching, circling, pointing, lying down and rolling over, and kneeling and sinking down as if exhausted – bear no obvious connection to the monologue, so we try to find the connections.  To me, these movements (intentionally or not) suggest a child playing alone, pleasing no one but herself, maybe thinking, maybe simply feeling the pleasurable physicality of her body, and then resting, tired by the burden of sad stories.  Meanwhile, geometric shapes, which we might realise are a jokey commentary, are projected onto a gauzy backdrop, and the disturbingly inappropriate but insistent music by Kelly Ryall drowns out the birdsong that reminds us of an outside (better?) world.  

Much is made, in the program notes, of the more and more frequent use of children – for a variety of purposes - in performance, but to me Ms Gunn approaches that subject obliquely or tangentially.  It’s there in her gestures; it’s there if we expand the idea of ‘children’ to adults and to include us too. 

But perhaps the way in which Working with Children is most ‘anti-theatre’ is in its strategy of open-ended non-completion.  There is a formal ‘rule’ in storytelling, from a joke through to the thirteen-hour television mini-series: set-up, complication and pay-off – or climax and resolution.  Ms Gunn studiously avoids step-three. 

The stories in her monologue have no endings.  We don’t find out what happened to the receptionist nick-named ‘Cod’ with the feminine hygiene problem.  We don’t know how the television show run by the creepy Marten turned out and certainly not what it is that children must be protected from.  Nevertheless, the implications hang in the air.

In other words, Ms Gunn creates expectations that she does not satisfy – or pay-off – culminating in her final sequence.  Her final strategy involves a number of most interesting props that she brings onto the stage – while we watch her do so.  Patiently.  Naturally we expect these props to add up, to create an effect of some sort, to have some meaning…  Ah, we think, the light will shine through those puffs of smoke and bounce off that mirror and then…

Are we frustrated?  Curiously, we are not – except for the end, but then the joke is on us and we should have known.  Does it all work?  Curiously, it almost does, although it is more playful than substantial even while being, as we expect from Ms Gunn, unlike just about anything else.  An experiment, as she would probably admit – and carried to no small extent by her deadpan but elfin charm.

Michael Brindley   

Subscribe to our E-Newsletter, buy our latest print edition or find a Performing Arts book at Book Nook.