The Beast

Eddie Perfect would be considered a major talent anywhere in the solar system. When The Beast burst onto the scene in 2013 at MTC, it took everyone by surprise. Carefully handled by Director Iain Sinclair, it was perhaps the best offering from MTC that year. Personally I believed we were witnessing the birth of a major new playwright in the style of Edward Albee. The play was flawed, but the potential was breath-taking.

It is marvellous that an Australian play is getting a Main Stage and Mainstream production, thanks, one suspects, to Simon Phillips. If there’s one thing Phillips knows inside out, it’s Mainstream. Main stage is about Bums on Seats and this Director excels in that area, with a track record second to none. But with that comes the necessity to dispense with anything arty and elitist. Gone is any subtlety, the fourth wall (all the gags are delivered out front to the audience), the sense of any credibility in character arcs, the holding up of any mirror to ourselves so that we wince as we laugh. Satire has been discarded for as much slapstick as the stage can possibly take. With a mantra of “Nothing succeeds like excess,” Phillips has transformed Edward Albee to Benny Hill. That’s an observation, not a criticism. The play’s flaws have been hyped even further and it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe any of it….right? I won’t go into the plot, because the whole is now more of a series of sketches than a cohesive play. Where the first production satirised the pretension of the middle class, this new staging lampoons it, sends it up, takes the piss without any thought of the ramifications.

Is this a good thing? Well, forget about the overhyped Noises Off. This version of The Beast is probably the funniest night you will have in theatre in your entire life…and if you never saw the original you will feel no pain, except that of laughing too hard and too long.

The archetypal characters have now become stereotypes. There is no danger of the mainstream audience having to think, or be concerned that they may be seeing themselves. The actors play solely for laughs; so excessive that they could never be mistaken for real human beings, so there’s no danger of a social conscience creeping into the audience. Ramped up to impossible OTT levels, it works deliciously as pure farce/slapstick….not only are women covered in blood, but the hateful Simon (Rohan Nicol channelling John Cleese) is also covered in shit from a dying cow, and the curtain comes down for the interval on Eddie Perfect himself (Baird) vomiting downstage…almost on the front row.

There isn’t much point in me prattling on about how much deeper and more meaningful the original production was; how it was a genuine play with a natural overarching progression, how it stabbed our psyche as we recognised ourselves in the mirror; or how it was an important indictment of a world we have made for ourselves and are now forced to live in. That is gone and, in the age-old dilemma of Art versus Money, very clear choices have been made.

The original cast acted with respect for the material. Because they were more constrained, and playing for truth, the excesses were all the more confronting and hit home with great impact. Any subtext the play still has is lost in the belly laughs and general hysteria. You get more than your money’s worth in the price of a ticket. The always terrific Christie Whelan-Browne is suitably cow-towed (excuse the pun) as Simon’s wife Gen, Heidi Arena works hard to give the caricature that is Sue some credibility, and Alison Bell is closest to a recognisable person as Marge. Toby Truslove plays Rob as a man in need of a strait jacket and a friendly asylum rather than a neurotic drowning in guilt over what he has been a party to. Nevertheless it’s great gross out entertainment.

I laughed along with everybody else, though not as hard. I still mourn the loss of a potentially great play, but then again – Nobody’s Perfect.

Coral Drouyn

Photographer: Ken Nakanishi.