No Pay? No Way!

We’ve had the Eureka Stockade and that Fascist kerfuffle at the opening of Sydney Harbour Bridge but Australians aren’t really into revolutions.  But what would you do if rents, rates, energy bills and supermarket prices just never stopped leaping upwards?

This hilarious adaptation of the Italian hit, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay – itself a far more incendiary title than No Pay? No Way!  – was originally a call to the streets by communist theatre makers Dario Fo and Franco Rama in 1974.   Their play’s farcical humour was meant to sweeten their earnest political attack on Italy’s government corruption and conspiracies of capitalists, banks and over charging supermarkets. 

I remember a couple of fashionably leftist but turgid Australian productions which with just unadorned translations were so heavy handed and unfunny.  This applauded adaptation by Marieke Hardy – who as Frank Hardy’s daughter has the appropriate communist ancestry – is not one of these. It’s a riot.

The first star is Charles Davis’ detailed design of a 1970’s Italian apartment with another identical block of neighbours through the windows. Davis’ costumes add yet more period colour. A housewive, a master of intrigue, Antonia, returns laden with groceries which local women have “liberated” from the supermarket in a riot against yet another price rise. 

With cops searching the block, Antonia (an irrepressibly comic Mandy McElhinney) hides some of the shopping under the coat of her devout young neighbour Margherita (an increasingly radical Emma Harvie).  The play’s unrolling falsehood is created when Antonia lies to her husband, (a gullible, comic straight man Glenn Hazeldine) that Marquerita’s bump is a pregnancy.  And this is news when her husband Luigi appears (the excitable Roman Delo).

The politics of underpaid workers claiming back their rights and what they produce becomes more compelling when the sergeant and bullying superintendent arrive (both roles, plus other mad ones, played in suitable excess by Aaron Tsindos).

Director Sarah Giles and her inventive cast deliver the thin thread of believability necessary to float the craziest of farcical stories.  Hardy’s adaptation abounds in droll wit, an easy English and enough topical references to remind us that this is not just about Italian problems.  Take the delicious metatheatre moment exploding midway when the STC’s backstage crew get the union message and themselves walk off the job, leaving the actors stranded in a fragmented set change. 

I’m no fan of obvious silly business but somehow this revived production, acclaimed in early 2020, maintains its madcap wit and physical comedy for two full hours. It’s packed with hysterics, and provocations, and belongs on the same high shelf as Giles’ earlier STC production of Fo and Rame’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Daniel Boud