Meow Meow

On Sunday night I enjoyed a prime view of Melissa Madden Gray’s besparkled derrière as she serenaded us in the Spiegeltent on the final night of her Sydney Festival season. It was a rare pleasure and a delight.

Meow Meow’s Little Match Girl is based on the Hans Christian Anderson tale by the same title and was inspired by the documentary The Oasis, following the lives of homeless youth in Sydney. First performed at the Malthouse in Melbourne under Marion Potts’ direction, it has enjoyed a sellout season here in Sydney.

Meow Meow avoids the potential for daggy political temerity by courting artistic failure from the start. She quickly blows a fuse belting out Cole Porter’s It’s Too Darn Hot and we are in darkness lit by phones and torches. The impoverishment of the set makes this queen of cabaret a little match girl of the stage. Without any bells and whistles, she admits theatrical defeat: “I was going to have multi-media – lots of multi-media.” This elicits a giggle of relief that we’re watching a girl stagger about in the dark and not a manifesto.

The device of failed theatre is a welcome acknowledgement of the general limits to political agency as an artist. This dispensed with, we happily accompany her on something akin to a narrative journey. Meow Meow’s little match girl stumbles to find her lighting and then her artistic light, failing grandly with a beat-poetry recitation in foetal position accompanied by “something avant-garde” on the piano.

After much stopping and starting (and purloining of audience property), the little match girl finds her fantastical redemption in the unsuspecting guise of David, an ostensible stalker in the audience (Mitchell Butel) who sings sweet Wagner in her ear. She reaches the peak of musical escapism when she disappears into the world’s loveliest plastic chandelier, singing Tear Down the Stars, which she composed with Iain Grandage.

I take the final two songs to be her most firm and sincere political statements in the show. Laurie Anderson’s The Dream Before is an ode to the angel of history from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, in which he describes Paul Klee’s etching Angelus Novus. The angel is blown backwards into the future, unable to minister to any of the horrors it sees on its way through. And this, we learn, “is progress”. Just as we have entered a pit of despair, contemplating the relentless onward march of time and its untold stories, Meow Meow entreats us to try a little caution with a delicate performance of Be Careful by Patty Griffin.

Somewhere between the two slightly paralysing worlds of Benjamin’s angel of history and the fatalistic tragedies of folklore, Meow Meow achieves a broken down, shambolic personal politics of care and pragmatism, culminating in a most practical command to buy her CDs! Her program notes quote Brecht: “First comes food, then comes morality.”

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Sydney Festival presents
Little Match Girl
Written and performed by Meow Meow

The Famous Spiegeltent, Hyde Park
January 6–29, 2012

You can watch Meow Meow’s Little Match Girl on STVDIO (channel 132 on FOXTEL & AUSTAR) at 8.30pm Monday March 19th