Apocalypse Bear Trilogy

Melbourne International Arts Festival: With pitch-perfect writing Lally Katz disarms us with humour before figuratively honing surgical instruments to razor-edges and ressecting flesh to expose deep, paralyzing, and dark anxieties at the core of suburban life in her new work Apocalypse Bear Trilogy.

Produced by the innovative A Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre and presented by the Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, Apocalypse Bear Trilogy premiered on Friday to a sold-out audience in the MTC Lawler Studio. That’s not surprising. Katz has a strong following and continues to develop a stellar career which already includes important named development scholarships and awards.

The ridiculousness (and riskiness) of the namesake device, the Apocalypse Bear, a bloke in an overtly bad bear suit, is emblematic of Katz’s engrossing writing method. It’s hard to look at a bear on stage without recalling children’s television programming or, since Mark Wallinger stumbled about in a Berlin museum to win the Turner Prize in 2007, heavy-handed political metaphors.

Katz uses an engaging and frequently self-reflexive language steeped in the very common place – cheese sandwiches, tram stops, office banter – to dissolve our baggaged associations and enable the audience to engage empathetically with her characters in situations bordering on the absurd. Part of the tension is that the artifice supporting the play risks dissolving at any instant. But the text, and in this performance the skilled credibility of characterizations animated by actors Brian Lipson (the Bear), Luke Mullins and Katherine Tonkin (Lipson and Mullins also co-direct) immerse us in vignettes where Katz’s Bear exposes the darker tones of the human condition.

The first part of this trilogy sees the Apocalypse Bear waiting inside when a school boy returns home before drama class to continue an online chat with The Fag from Zagreb, who is poised on the edge of despairing suicide. With friendly candor (Lipson’s voice and subtle gestures convey a convincing concern) the boy reveals the roots of his social and sexuality identity anxiety.

We learn that the boy has ventured two tram stops too far on the way home to visit the dark woods, (a menacing and metaphoric space where the Bear resides). Video designer Martyn Coutts’ backdrop – a projected suburban kitchen subtly micro-shifting in its viewpoint and slowly drifting to our left, is used to great effect. First presaging then showing a tragic delivery using a simple figure silhouette in a doorway in-filled with crackling pre-digital television static-screen patterns that eventually consume the tableau.

The Bear’s gentle interrogation reveals a near identical anxiety and the looming, menacing dark of the woods resurface again in the second part Return to the Office. Director Mullins noted in an earlier interview with Matthew Clayfield that he was struck by the tonal similarity in these two vignettes, and the ensemble worked with Katz to create the coda At Last.

Here a couple try to work through their relationship difficulties (the stereotypical dialogue is acutely and painfully accurate) and consider making a baby. In this work the Bear is a background presence and lighting designer Richard Vabre’s down-lights project a dappled pattern, like lightfall through a forest canopy, evoking the sense that we are deep in the heart of the woods (where the Bear is lurking). Later a simple illuminated rectangle is used to denote the bed where the couple fail to consummate their intent, as the dark edges of set designer Mel Page’s staging closes in, heightened (as the Bear said, the music engages you…) by sound designer Jethro Woodward’s score, in slowly measured metre, anxiously, claustrophobically.

While the sameness of tone in the three parts can make the pace seem slow, especially in the third part, this remains an exceptional production. The uniformity of tone oddly also evokes a sense of universality so that the closing line "sometimes I feel so sorry for the neighbours" echoes with disarmingly poignant irony.

Try hard to get a seat – a play of this caliber is rare new writing and it may not yet be impossible to see this outstanding ensemble premier during MIAF.

Apocalypse Bear Trilogy
Lally Katz
A Stuck Pigs Squealing Theatre production presented by MTC as part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival
MTC Lawler Studio
Season: Sat 10 - Sat 24 Oct at 7:30pm