Edging

Edging is about borders.  Borders have edges - conscious and unconscious.  ‘Natural’ and artificial.  Acceptable and unacceptable.  Borders between races, between nations, between people who have rights and people who do not have rights.  (‘We will decide…’ as our Prime Minister said.)  There are borders we impose and borders we enforce.    

Edging is a constantly surprising, very funny, very original, sly little show that makes reference, tangentially or explicitly, to all of these borders.  Pop culture does not escape scrutiny.  The show is a series of items and elements, joined in a stop-start manner with abrupt transitions that might appear at first random, but they are all connected, purposeful, and all on-message.  Much is made of the Australian Border Force (italics mine) that exists for our security, safety and purity and whose officers wear black and reminiscent uniforms.  Border Force is the show’s primary target – and its metaphor…

On stage there’s a security check conveyor belt, on which sits a big silver suitcase. There’s a rectangular screen, on which various pertinent images are projected, above the stage.  But we hear Sammaneh Pourshafighi, via a speaker, before we see them.  They ask if we think they have an unusual voice.  I guess we might be thinking ‘Well, not really, but now you mention it…’  But apart from a slight trace of a hard-to-place accent, it is a commanding, challenging voice, a bossy voice, a voice that will brook no contradiction – and that voice that will stay absolutely in charge for the next sixty minutes.  

There’s an element of revenge in that voice for all that Pourshafighi has endured since childhood – including submitting to the name ‘Sonya’ because people couldn’t – or couldn’t be bothered to - pronounce the given name…  When Pourshafighi appears in leisure wear - a teal tracksuit, sunglasses and big hair - it’s, well, a surprise.  Not what we expected?

Pourshafighi’s stooge/clown/victim is Eden Falk (his real name), a very experienced actor - and Voice Over artist.  Here he is called upon to play – or pretend to be - a Border Force officer, first appearing with a sniffer dog like no sniffer dog that was ever employed by Border Force in reality.  The audience loves this shaggy dog – of course.  But the dog’s essential wrongness points up the comedy in the whole process.  Falk, meanwhile, does not do any ‘acting’ (that is, as his character) as he blankly inspects and disposes of items from the silver suitcase.  He does these things as if quite aware of the absurdity of his Border Force officer’s bullying actions.  The items travel along the conveyer belt and fall disregarded on the floor.  It’s a fine example of that Shakespeare line re a petty tyrant, ‘dressed in a little brief authority…’

Even more reluctantly Falk is forced to admit that he supplied the Voice Over for Australia’s top-rating – i.e. very, very popular - very long running reality television show called… Border Force.  Clips are projected on the screen.  Pourshafighi gets Falk to repeat some of the banal, trivialising things he had to say.  He cringes.  So do we.  Pointedly, if implicitly, Pourshafighi asks us to think about that show’s longevity and popularity – and how comforting it was (and is) that Border Force is still ever vigilant.   

But Falk also made a television commercial for P&O cruises…  Pourshafighi is very dubious about this.  Falk agrees but pleads that he needed the money.   

Through these antics, Pourshafighi orders Falk about – and he obeys.  That’s why he’s there – even if he obeys under protest and with bad grace.  He is, we realise by the end of the show, Us – complicit in the erection and approval of so many borders and the enforcement of them – and so we just might begin to think about what these borders are for - and why do we maintain them, why do we need them?  The fact that the show ends with a wrestling match pretty much sums it up.  Under the comedy, there is a sharp intelligence and a challenging wit, delivered so smoothly that we only realise and wince at the accusations later.

Michael Brindley      

Photographer: Gregory Lorenzutti