Jazz or A Bucket of Blood

This is a daffy, clowning, faux-amateur, absurd, and very funny fifty-five minutes.  The alternative in the title is never resolved.  On stage, there are two chairs and a metal bucket.  Ange comes on with a confident but somehow dangerous smile.  Jane sort of stumbles onto the stage; her smile is anxious, more of a rictus of terror.  The contrast is pretty much how they’ll go on.  The know-it-all smartie and the dope, the foil, the unwitting comic relief.  The White Clown and the Stumblebum.  Both are dressed as primary school kids: grey short sleeve shirts, grey elastic waist shorts and grey socks.  No shoes.  Why?  Doesn’t matter.  Kids putting on a show for the grown-ups? 

We in the audience reckon that bucket might be the eponymous bucket of blood.  So, where’s the jazz?  Who knows?  Ange and Jane debate what the show could be about: jazz, or a bucket of blood – and the comedy potential of each.  Yes, that is the bucket of blood.  Ange says she found it.  (Later, the blood pays off.)  Yes, jazz can be funny.  They descend on a bloke (a plant?) in the audience, so he can decide.  He comes up with ‘Motherhood’.

And so ‘Motherhood’ becomes what it’s all about.  Well, for a minute - an infinitesimal part of a show that also claims to be about – according to the press release – feminism (I didn’t notice), content written by AI, what is a baby (that bit is shocking, confrontational), Billy Joel (a few bits of songs), and Bunnings.  Bunnings is hugely important – to Jane.  She’s disappointed that her friends from Bunnings haven’t shown up.  But some of the audience get Bunnings caps and we wear them, and Jane is thrilled: her friends did show up.  This is disturbing: it verges on laughing at someone mentally disabled.  Ange lets Jane sing, watching with a knowing if not malicious smile…  

They move among the audience with piggie-wig money boxes, asking for donations, raising $3.70 – which is enough to pay off the torches they hold under their faces to sing a spooky song… that just… peters out like everything else.  No punchlines here, folks.  Ange, however, acts throughout like she is in control – of Jane anyway.  Jane keeps showing us how scared and amateur she is by confusion, corpsing or giggling… This pair have absolutely no fear of making complete fools of themselves.  If they did, this going-out-on-a-limb show would fail spectacularly.

It takes considerable talent to play characters who seem talentless, awkward and amateur without looking as if the performers really are talentless, awkward and amateur.  If they are talentless, an audience can only cringe and be embarrassed for them, and soon hate them, and have a very sad, sour evening.  But if you get the joke, and they put on a show that seems as if they did not really have a show prepared (let alone rehearsed) at all, but they’ll do it anyway with random bits and bobs, in no particular order, some of which bits they’ve never even done before – well, that could be a lot of fun.  Here, it is.

The audience (mostly Gen X and millennials on opening night) get the joke straight off, loving the chaos, the naughty gags, the sight gags, and the cringe-making embarrassment of it all.  The show zips along and Ange and Jane are – in their own ways – hugely entertaining.  And of course, their show is not a random assembly of bits and bobs as the cleverly chosen music cues demonstrate; it’s just meant to look that way.

Ange Lavoipierre and Jane Watt have that considerable talent to act as if they have none.  It’s a highly polished piece of work.  We saw it at 10 pm and it was worth staying up late.

Michael Brindley

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