Working Class Clown

The performance space for the Biennale of Sydney at the White Bay Power Station is ‘out the back’. Which is not to say that it’s small. Open plan, the audience faces 40 steps to a first floor platform (with occasional strolling viewers), only a third of the way to a huge cathedral-style roof, hung with draperies and flags too distant to discern. It’s hardly the venue for an intimate one-person show.

Yet it’s here that Samoan/Australian actor Tommy Misa has to tell his tender, troubled story of life in Canberra as a gay boy and youth. 

Now with natty moustache and pearly white teeth, he enters from far, far away in a roomy two-part clown’s outfit, and soon tries to get us onside with his warm-up patter. The audience occasionally struggles to hear him off-mike.

As the ‘town fool’ he has the unique Samoan power to speak truth. There’s a selection of events when he was 14, featuring a hated teacher named Mr Bruce, and his appearance before Mr Leech, the principal. At 19 he’s fined for stealing.

Meanwhile acting takes over. There’s a nice section about his audition as Shakespeare’s Caliban, before he expresses sorrow, weeping copiously at the death of his beloved father.

On every seat there’s been a sheet of lyrics for ‘Tears in Heaven’ by Eric Clapton, ‘In Laughing Memory of Mefiposeta Misa’, so I guessed that would come before the end. But we only get halfway through the song before Tommy indicates that the show is over.

The on-line program lists four others ‘Artists’ who will be in the show but their contribution is on the art and fashion side.

Frank Hatherley

Photographer: Joseph Mayers.