Wrecking Ball

The ‘wrecking ball’ of the title refers to the controversial – if that’s the word – 2013 music video by Miley Cyrus, directed by the Terry Richardson.  In the video, in case you’ve not seen it, Ms Cyrus sings in her underwear, hefts and licks a sledgehammer and swings naked on a wrecking ball.  She has since said she regrets it, but, hey, it did get her a lot of attention (as did her ‘twerking’ - and more, in her underwear – at the MTV music awards), and whose idea was it?  Was she a victim manipulated by the apparently notorious, exploitative Terry Richardson?  Or did she go for it?  Who masterminded the MTV performance, way more raunchy than the video?  Or has Ms Cyrus completely surrendered – force majeure or just being ‘realistic’ - to the image the ‘industry’ has made of her, so that it’s not an ‘image’ anymore, it’s her.

These questions are central to Action Hero’s Wrecking Ball, sparked by the creators’ serious fascination with pop (or mainstream?) culture, which influences, like it or not, our values, beliefs and behaviour – if we let it.  It is the third of Action Hero’s presentations at Arts House on this visit, but they claim in their detailed program note that Wrecking Ball is their ‘first play’ – that is, that with it they ‘set out intentionally to write a play’. 

That would seem to rely on a rather narrow definition of ‘a play’ and I’m surprised at that.  (Are previous Action Hero presentations A Western and Hoke’s Bluff not ‘plays’?)  After all, throughout this ‘play’ the so-called ‘fourth wall’ is continually broken – deliberately broken in an attempt to include the audience in the fiction being created – that is, to enlist the audience on the controlling fiction maker’s side.  Wrecking Ball certainly involves the audience – or tries to – as audience and as allies– far more than, say Hoke’s Bluff, which pulls in audience members only momentarily as characters in the story. 

Here, we’re in a photographer’s studio and an unnamed ‘Celebrity’, possibly a rock star (Gemma Painton, nothing like Miley Cyrus) waits to have photographs taken.  She is in no frame of mind to question the process.  The Photographer (James Stenhouse), wearing, incidentally, the same sort of tartan shirt as Terry Richardson wears, welcomes the audience, while mixing a cocktail.  If the aim is to make us – the audience – complicit, it really doesn’t work.  Or perhaps that should be, it doesn’t work with the sceptical Australian audience.  What’s this bloke up to?  We smell bullshit and we keep an eye on the Celebrity who seems quite unassuming if not too bright.

From the start, the Photographer seems like a sleazoid and his smooth, relaxed, ‘warm’ patter clearly phoney.  The play is about taking control by the remaking of reality.  The Photographer’s offers to the Celebrity to work together on a different basis, for them to collaborate, are intended to dominate and to ensure that he is in charge and that things will proceed on his terms. 

When she mistakenly offers suggestions, she gets a curt ‘No, I can’t work with that.’  When she resists, by going and sulkily sitting with the audience, it’s futile because he really is in charge and although the audience (our audience anyway) is actually on her side, it doesn’t help – and he tells her it doesn’t help - because she doesn’t know what her side is.  And anyway, we want to see how far he’ll go.  The ‘suspension of disbelief’ necessary to go along with some fiction of what she is, is itself suspended until the Celebrity, worn down, comes to believe the fiction he has made of her.  We don’t believe it, but we believe she does. 

But to maintain his control, the Photographer must bamboozle and bludgeon, sucking her into more and more violent and absurd images – and somehow we end up in the midst of images (albeit cliché images) of Pacific island bomb tests, made out to be inevitable and the logical end of things.  This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a lie.

If all this feels somewhat bloodless and ‘intellectual’, it is saved from aridity by its wit.  That is, it has the necessary quality for any deconstruction to work: it’s funny.  It is constantly interesting because we want to know what will happen next, how far he will go and whether she will escape the trap.  The play asks, by implication, whether we can escape the trap of the fictions designed to control us.  The great thing about Action Hero is that they ask very serious questions and make the asking very serious fun.  That’s a real and rare skill.

Michael Brindley