Cars, chaos and death — but no princess
Autogeddon
By Heathcote Williams and Nightshift Theatre Asylum
St Stephens Church, Newtown, Sydney
Review by Brendan Doyle
The timing was brilliant, but not, alas, the publicity. Here's a group putting on a show about the car as killer, greatest ecological disaster of the century, and responsible for half a million deaths each year — but only seven of us were there in the audience.
Billed as "a pre-millennial assemblage on the theme of the upcoming auto-apocalypse", Autogeddon bears the marks of director Lindsay Smith's early work with Melbourne's Pram Factory, since the style is decidedly early seventies revisited. But no less energetic for that.
The show starts outside, next to the church's ancient cemetery, where petrol bowsers rear up among the tombstones. A General Schwarzkopf character in combat gear reads a passage from Revelations, about the imminent car-driven apocalypse.
We then move into the church hall, where a silent cop marks the centre of the acting space, and a beaten-up old car rolls dangerously down a ramp, containing the performers.
What follows is a freewheeling performance combining poetry, bits of play texts, movement, ranting and declaiming, much improvisation and a stunning video montage. At one point Godard's film Weekend, about road carnage, is doubled by live actors who shout a translation of the French text in English.
Consider this, the show asks. If you kill someone with a piece of bumper bar off a car, you'll get life in jail. If the bumper bar's still attached to a car, you'll probably lose your licence and get a good behaviour bond.
Why the double standard? Because the car is God in our civilisation. Many discover the joys of sex in cars, many are conceived in cars. You probably went to your wedding in a car and will no doubt go to your funeral in one. How can we be objective about an object that many men in particular have such an intimate relationship with?
This is rough theatre, a style made popular here at La Mama and Nimrod. Much of it is improvised, for example when the director calls for two volunteers from the audience to read a scene from a Brecht play that has been adapted to refer to the horrors of the car culture.
There's a feeling that anything's possible, which is an exhilarating change from much commercial stodge. The downside is that such spontaneity can be boring if it's not controlled. Your reviewer is ashamed to say that he left after two hours; it got very cold in the hall. A bit of pruning will do wonders for this otherwise entertaining and thoughtful show.