Sex is back in fashion in theatre. In Melbourne, at any rate. And not just the plain old missionary position, or rear-view action, but sequins, feathers, pasties and all the other accoutrements of a festishised version of 1950s burlesque. And, even more intriguingly, a celebration of the defiantly misogynistic heterosexual male. So what’s happening, and why now?
Over the past few years I’ve been struck by the confluence of rampantly “politically incorrect” sexuality in performance works I’ve seen around Melbourne and the loss of Western sovereignty as shorthanded by the Iraq War (I and II), the home-grown bombings of London and Madrid, and our own variation on this in Bali, the never-ending Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and of course 9:11. I’d go so far as to speculate that there is a link between the two. In fact, I’m going to assert it!
I’m talking mainly but not only about the independent sector, and including in this cabaret, drama and the brasher end of performance. A broad sweep and with many exceptions but enough bare flesh to suggest a whole new politics of the sexual self and its relationship to the social body.
Example one: There’s the rise of girlie shows, such as The Burlesque Hour, and acts like The Town Bikes and La Clique, within a broader context of clubs (Gin Palace, Cookie, The Spiegeltent etc) embracing an imagined past of velvet couches and louche glances across cocktails the names of which remind me of a John Updike novel, or a James Bond movie. A knowing retro fantasy where irony is the main game. Like the recently departed Baudrillard, it’s as if we are all playing a version of a reality that might not even exist. More specifically, these shows I’ve mentioned celebrate the male gaze on the female body but take enormous, and I mean enormous, pleasure in subjugating this gaze to the sexual potency of the powerful woman. (“Down, boy! Down!”)
So when Moira Finucane, with a very sharp pin, bursts the red balloons that constitute her costume in one of her best-known works, she’s acting out a fantasy but also sticking it to the very idea that her body can be contained in this way. So too The Town Bikes as pleasantly plump milk-maids, breasts jiggling as they sing songs so innocently and with gestures so Sunday-school cliched that every move becomes lewd. (Watching them in last year’s Melbourne Fringe, I was in some strange way reminded of Hitler’s racial politics, where buxom fraulein and muscle-bound athletes signified a new world order. But I’ll have to save that sort of historical parallel, or curiosity, for another piece. And I’m certainly not claiming The Town Bikes are fascist!)
Example two: And then there’s shows from a male perspective, an ostensibly straight one. Well, at first glance. The big hit of the 2006 Fringe was Rubeville, a production of Black Lung Theatre in a little shabby space in Northcote. I loved this show, for all sorts of reasons, and was completely untroubled by its casual dismissal of females as more than easy meat. (Contra that mufti in Sydney.) This was the point of the work in a way; it kept pushing over sacred cows, whether ideologies or aesthetics, and in doing so placing them under the blowtorch of twentyfirst-century zeitgeist. At the same time you’d have to say that there was a real zest in sticking it in, in a different way needless to say to Moira and the like.
A View of Concrete, a play by Gareth Ellis produced at the Malthouse, again last year, was another case in point. Two girls, two boys, in perpetual adolescence due, the writer asserted, to the fucked global politics that inhabited his headspace in writing the piece at the tender age of twenty-one. Lots of ‘language’, lots of rants, lots of boy fucks girl because there’s nothing on TV. Spart and ODD Productions are another couple of initiatives that come to mind: more of same old, same old sex and sperm, and therefore absolutely contemporary. (And I think here of counterparts in popular music: Jet at home, The Living End elsewhere, to take but two examples.)
Queer culture will tell you that this sort of political hanky-panky has been around for a long time, and it has. But the interesting development here is the mainstreaming of campness, vampness and straight-out rotten-to-the-core boy-men.
It’s even more interesting when, looking back at Melbourne theatre trends, the 1980s is characterised by the influences of Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan and Foucault (think Margaret Cameron, Jenny Kemp and Whistling in the Theatre), the 1990s by cross-cultural borrowings and physical explorations (Hildegard, Not Yet It’s Difficult, Sarah Cathcart), and the early noughties by a ferocious thieving from popular culture (Stuck Pigs Squealing, dislocate, Uncle Semolina and friends).
How does all this stack up against the world politics of our times?
I venture the thought that it’s as if, as the world burns, people fuck, a common phenomenon apparently, and one that makes sense when all else is lost. And perhaps there’s also a desire, however unconscious, to disavow the social constructs that purportedly define us—giving the bird, so to speak, to theories, ideologies, beliefs (whatever catchphrase seems applicable) that have profoundly failed us.
But why sex? Or sexual politics? Why the flamboyantly straight version of things as a way of being wicked? Perhaps George Bush, John Howard and all that they represent bring out the need to get down and dirty. This sounds simplistic I know, but if we live in a straight straight world, as someone once said, how obvious is the need to bend over?
Maryanne Lynch
Book Lovers Boudoir, Billet Doux #1: In the spirit of inquiry and with the fevour of an unapologetic bibiophile, I recommend Matthew Sweet’s Inventing the Victorians (Faber, 2001) as an example of another age where belts were eased and buttons undone in the midst of a puritanical social code and a changing world order. And for its rereading of a time that we understand way too narrowly. Just as ours will most likely be by generations yet to come.
This column is co-authored by Stephen Armstrong and Maryanne Lynch, who both work at Malthouse Theatre. The opinions expressed in individual articles are neither shared nor company views.
