Button

Button, a new work devised by Carole Patullo and Jane Bayly and directed by Melanie Beddie for La Mama Courthouse, is a bit of everything. This musing on loneliness, aging, fear and friendship has songs, poetry, melancholic soliloquies, dancing, fart jokes, profoundity, cutting wit, overcooked arty physical theatre, hilarity, magic tricks – you name it, Button has it.

Two lonely women – one a recently-bereaved, practical but philosophical career woman, the other a shut-in with hoarding tendencies and a touch of the stalker – live next door to each other, and after an awkward encounter over a jar of buttons, they begin an equally awkward friendship.

Singing and speaking in unison, these two very different women find the common threads of aging and loneliness, and present them to us for our edification. Delightfully accompanied by Peter Farnan on guitar and ukelele – providing musical support, dramatic scoring and the occasional musical punchline – Patullo and Bayly don’t hesitate to bust out catchy numbers. (I’ll be humming ‘I’m Not Dead Yet’ for a while to come).

Button’s set is beautifully minimal and intriguing – a joint effort by designer Melanie Liertz, Alexandra Summers (responsible for a beautiful set of spiderwebs with lace doilies at their hearts) and Daniele Poidomani (a pair of matching but very different armchairs). The set alone, even without the performers, would almost manage to serve as a potted narrative of the entire work in physical form.

In its attempts to offer a bit of everything, it’s hard to see Button as a particularly cohesive experience. It veers crazily from musical numbers to dreamy non-sequiteur-filled poetry; from serious movement pieces to Broadway-parody dancing; from hammy physical comedy and off-colour jokes, to sharp and incisive hilarious witticisms that hit you like a bread roll to the side of the head, topping it all off with profound little insights, quirks and musings that you suspect will come back to you at random times, while standing in a supermarket or staring out a train window, for years to come.

That said, while it’s a bit of a hodgepodge, and gets quite bogged down at points, it’s pretty difficult not to enjoy Button. Not least because of the show’s most spectacular feat of staging, which was so good that the audience broke into spontaneous mid-show applause, and required the services of the work’s magic consultant Alex de la Rambelje.

Both Patullo and Bayly’s characters are fascinating to watch; their idiosyncrasies alone make for great theatre, and it’s really very clear that everyone involved was driven by the spirit of fun in the devising of the work as much as by any philosophical musings. And if one can attend a show and be both entertained and given something to think about, then what more can one really ask for?

Rating: 3½ stars out of 5

La Mama Courthouse, Carlton
29 May – 16 June