Sauce

At a primary school sausage sizzle, the snags are coming off the griddle and, drenched with a gloop of tomato sauce, selling fast.  But suddenly there’s an horrific barbeque stopper: little Max doesn’t want tomato sauce.  He doesn’t like tomato sauce.  What??  Is he… a terrorist, a vandal, un-Australian?

On this premise Simon Godfrey builds a dizzying, towering tale in which Max’s taste preference precipitates worldwide crisis, reaching out to President Hillary Clinton and President Vladimir Putin, leading to an invasion of sauce-soaked Australia and radical change to the world as we know it.  Naturally, Mr Godfrey plays all these characters and many more (about thirty, some inanimate) with his usual startling metamorphoses.

The first show of Mr Godfrey’s I saw was The Misery Factory; it wason an even smaller stage than that at the Butterfly Club and Mr Godfrey was partnered with equally talented Dan Alleman.  The show was very good for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it had some connection – tenuous at times, but discernible – to reality.  The laughs came at oblique comments and twisted references to contemporary life.  Intentionally or not, there was a satirical bent.  Under the ‘silliness’, the absurdity and the nonsense, it made sense.

Unfortunately, this was not so much the case with Mr Godfrey’s 2014 solo show, The Earth is Flat, and nor is it so with Sauce.  Despite Mr Godfrey’s amazing ability to be anything from an Aussie schoolkid to a Joint Chief of Staff and flashes of the sharpest wit, the show’s narrative leaps become more and more arbitrary – a stream of disordered consciousness.  You give up trying to follow where he’ll go next – which means you stop caring what happens next.  Flashes of the sharpest observation lose their edge through having no real context.  His leaping about as he switches roles is excessive and superfluous – director Scott McAteer should have reined that in – that is, if he could.

Laughs were rather scarce; the small but well-disposed and sympathetic audience were not falling about and seemed (although I could be wrong) more bemused than anything else.  There is brilliant silliness, so brilliant that it overcomes silliness (Spike Milligan, say, or Lewis Carroll) and then there is silliness that is just, well, silly, forced and falls flat.  What is quite frustrating is that Mr Godfrey is hugely talented and verging on unique in his humour.  If only he would anchor those qualities – even if with the most fragile tendrils – to a recognisable world.  I.e. have something to say.

Michael Brindley