Reviews: Colin Rose - Timeout - The Sun Herald:
Howard Jackson, the author and director of a funny, intelligent and caustic new satire called clickBANG, wants you to know that he began work on the play in 1994. Why? Because his fictitious dictatorship of “Thalaymor” bears more than a passing resemblance to East Timor, which is now filling our newspapers and TV screens.
Jackson’s either remarkably prescient or history has an unhappy way of repeating itself.
Five Australians find themselves under house arrest in what’s left of their embassy after it has been ransacked by an angry mob. One of the Australians secretly videotaped the dictator’s daughter, Princess Tee, in flagrante delicto. This embarrassingly pornographic home video was then broadcast on the Internet bringing Thalaymore’s crisis to a head.
The princess’s revenge is cruel and unusual; the Australians will remain locked up and under continual visual scrutiny until one of them confesses to being the voyeur with the handycam.
Troy (John Blair) and Cassandra (Phillipa Trelford) are a pair of TV journalists, covering Thalaymore’s civil war (and unwittingly fuelling it (does that sound familiar?): Buzz (Dudley Hogarth) is a doctor who has lost his moral compass: his wife Rose (Monique Westermann), turns tricks for pocket money; and Dick (Nick Jasprizza) is a building contractor who develops a conscience after bulldozing a native village.
Apart from this angry, mortified look at what it means to be an Australian at home and abroad, clickBANG also gives the media an enjoyable drubbing, chiefly through the character Brian (Kim Mordaunt), a shallow, self-absorbed news anchor on the telly back in Oz.
The latest in Belvoir St’s B Sharp season, clickBang is thoughtful, provocative and very amusing, spraying non-stop jokes along with some hard truths in a quasi-poetic style. The effect, as Jackson himself describes it, is like watching TV with someone who’s got attention deficit disorder and won’t let go of the control.
The play slips uneasily into melodrama in the final stretch and at times the calibration of Jackson’s direction is a bit too hysterical, but these are small complaints, clickBANG has much more heart, bite and bile than the limp satire now playing in the Upstairs theatre, yet it’d the latter that’s packing them in. Another sign of our cultural degeneracy, perhaps.
Cast in order of stage appearance:
Dudley Hogarth as Buzz Kennedy
Monique Westermann as Rose Kennedy
John Blair as Troy Gulpin
Nick Jasprizza as Dick O’Connor
Phillipa Trelford as Cassandra Charmers
Kim Mordaunt as Brian Mulholland
Audrey Low as Princess Tee
Design - Katrina Fish
Producer - Elena Guest
Music (Brian’s Theme) - Stephen Lalor
Written and directed by Howard Jackson.
Belvoir St. Theatre
27 июл 2016
