Merciless Gods

Melbourne queer company Little Ones Theatre reveals a dark underbelly of life and love in the intimate space of Sydney’s Griffin.  

This is an adaptation of eight stories from a collection by Christos Tsiolkas published in 2014, a highly visceral and wrenching voyage though prisons, deathbeds, saunas and alleyways to cheap rent boys, drugs and porn.

Writer Dan Giovannoni doesn’t always translate the exposition of literature into living theatrical experience but, even then, Tsiolkas’ original words still shock and grabs us by the throats.

Merciless Gods begins with a compelling reunion of old university friends playing a drug-fuelled game of sharing their best revenge stories.   More of this theme would be good, but we leap instead to a grandmother mourning in Greek for her son while watching his videos as a porn star.

Then, an abandoned daughter arrives in Berlin begging for acknowledgment from her (naked) foul-mouthed mother (Jennifer Vuletic).

But Merciless Gods has most impact from its male voices and stories.  Indeed, Vuletic shines best playing a working class man dying amongst his Surry Hills family.  Other standouts are a diminutive rent boy telling the tender story of his lover and fellow drug abuser. And as still as a Greek god, a prison inmate unloads the details of blood and shit in a revenge murder.  As the petals fall, Tsiolkas’ world of dispossession and brutal homosexual love and pain is pure Genet.

The language is foul poetry and the sexual detail explicit.

Director Stephen Nicolazzo has assembled a diverse cast of fine actors, unmannered and unsentimental. Paul Blenheim, Peter Paltos, Charles Purcell, Sapidah Kian, Brigid Gallacher and Vuletic bring an emotional immediacy, even to those odd stories left sagging under exposition.  

There’s lots of smoky atmosphere on Eugyenne Teh’s naked space, against a velvet red show curtain, lit colourfully by Katie Sfetkidis with background sound by Daniel Nixon.

Martin Portus 

Photographer: Sarah Walker