Stunt Double
The Farm are a Queensland-based collective of creatives, who performed their work, Ninth Wave, here in 2022.
They have a track record of combining humour with modern dance and multi-media (produced by Performing Lines) and started writing Stunt Double over a zoom session during lockdown a few years ago.
The main theme is how privilege and entitlement, undeservedly, favour the stars, so they interviewed many stunt performers (including regulars in Australian film, Carly Rees and Marco Sinigaglia) whose identities are often unrecognised and whose achievements are assumed to be by the main players.
This new commission (scripted by Gavin Webber) starts promisingly with a B-grade film company working on an “OzPloitation” script set in an outback pub.
An old ‘70s cassette player booms out Aussie hits from the Skyhooks (Ego is Not a Dirty Word), JPY (Yesterday’s Hero), Little River Band (Lonesome Loser) singing out hints as to the theme of the show.
Brave audience members are pre-allocated roles as extras (including rabid dingoes!) while the main players (as the rehearsing film actors) choreograph the staged fights, sometimes with slow-mo punches and high jumps landing on the pool table.
Our stud action hero (Gavin Webber again) is getting a little long in the tooth but demands the filming always shows his best profile, while his patient stunt double is doing all the hard, physical work, take after take.
The audience responded audibly to the Paul Hogan-style humour and appreciated the film-within-a-film storyline.
The cast are very assured, especially the women.
Kate Harman has strong comic timing and movement skills playing starlet, Maureen; Ngoc Phan is authoritative and fun as the film crew’s Assistant Director and WAAPA-trained Alex Kay has the appropriate physicality of a stunt performer as well as a dancer.
It will be interesting to see them in more substantial material in the future.
This semi-experimental work comes with quite a few warnings - strobe lighting, coarse language, adult themes, semi-nudity, violence, and sexual references - so even though the humour, at times is quite childish, this work is definitely not for children.
Which is a shame, because kids would be impressed by the surreal dance number in which Maureen and her double are clad in disco white suits, framed by rotating office wall panels.
As they appeared and disappeared, cleverly trading places behind the panels, somehow, a real rally-car Volvo was snuck on stage like magic!
Unfortunately, at just under the 90-minute mark, audience members were getting restless at the repetitive fight/car smash sequences.
Perhaps if some of the more esoteric dance and multi-media elements were scaled down, there would have been more of what The Farm seem to specialise in - their quirky humour and appealing performers.
After Perth Festival, Stunt Double is touring to HOTA, Gold Coast and Canberra Theatre Centre in March.
Jane Keehn
Photographer: Jade Ferguson
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