THEATRE REVIEW: Love Monkey, The Amazing Business, (Melbourne)

Love Monkey is a stunning production not to be missed!  

If you read the blurb on the back of the postcard for Love Monkey, you not only get a pretty good description of the performance, but also wonderously misled with this multi-layered and somewhat complicated story.

Writer and performer John-Paul Hussey and director Lucien Savron have pulled off a remarkable achievement in not only making Love Monkey an entirely intriguing and entertaining production from start to finish, but also, with the contribution of Kelly Ryall (Original Music/Sound Design), Matt Gingold (Set and Video Design) and Shane Grant (Lighting), have achieved a fully fleshed-out production that sees our hero (or is that anti-hero?!) cross from continent to continent, meeting all sorts of colourful characters and ‘animals’ in order to fall in ‘The Great Watery Cup of Love’.

Sound simple enough? Yes. In reality? Not on your life!

Most of the performance resembles the best of David Lynch: rich vocal characterisations, verbal ramblings with obscure visual references that are certainly hard to follow, but like a good Kate Bush song, seem to make emotional sense, despite the absurdity that hovers on the surface.

Hussey is thoroughly engaging in his performance and is very physical without seeming to do too much within the small stage space.

Texture is given to many words and phrases and physicalisation is present in many descriptive comments.

This draws the audience into the character’s own inner-sanctum as much as it does to illustrate his own eccentricity and simplicity.

However, as noted above, this production succeeds as a creative collective, working with each other within a tightly organised and controlled arena.

A misplaced video projection, a wayward lighting or music cue could easily disrupt (and certainly confuse) the audience’s gaze, which already needs to be sharp, as Hussey goes branching out – sometimes leaving the audience to pick up the scent halfway through any one of the many descriptive and very funny sub-stories.

With much dependence on the production qualities to make the performance as a whole worth its weight in gold, the opposite is also true.

The world this character inhabits to tell his story so solemnly, takes not only a focussed performance mind, but a director who can weave the right formations for the tapestry to be appealing.

Both Hussey and Savron have achieved this; at the end of the performance, you are left wanting more, yet feel satisfied enough that the story has come full-circle.

And the ‘production value’ – something large theatre companies always seem to strive for, yet nearly always miss the mark – cannot be denied.

In sporting terminology, it was ‘a team effort’! Too bad this reviewer wasn’t around to see the Monkey’s earlier exploits with the first two Monkey Trilogy productions – Chocolate Monkey (2002) and Spacemunki (2004) – that hopefully large theatre companies can produce in the near future, so theatre such as this has a window of opportunity to be apprecaited by a much wider audience.

Love Monkey is a stunning production not to be missed!

Venue: Northcote Town Hall, 189 High Street Northcote
Dates: May 30 – June 15
Times: Tues – Sat @ 8pm; Sundays @ 6pm
Tickets: Previews:$12, $25/$20
Bookings: 9639 0096 or www.easytix.com.au