Reviews: Rosemary Neill, The Australian - The absurdly titled Fee Fi Fo Fum, Howard Jackson’s latest play, is the most daringly original and poetically vivid new Australian drama I have seen this year. It’s also very funny.
Jackson’s script and invective production are like a three-dimensional hallucination which moves, in the time it takes you to close your fist, between the realms of dream, myth, literary history and the gritty immediacy of a hot parched, Australian present.
With tongue lodged firmly in a disfigured cheek, the playwright has fashioned a post-modern fable about a murderous bird smuggler, two ex-prisoner lesbians trying to define their relationship “on the outside”, and a death-defying swagman who speaks almost entirely in verse.
The primary strength of Fee Fi Fo Fum is the way it treats language like a noisy festivity: Jackson adapts phrases from Shakespeare, parodies Paterson’s and Lawson’s poems and captures with seeming ease the fractured syntax of an Australian working class idiom. He also displays a facility for metaphors which, for a startling instant, help you see the world anew.
It can be a perilously non-objective enterprise when playwrights direct their own work. But here, when the action shifts from ocean floor to a dingy in shark-infested waters, you remain riveted, such is the imaginative pull of Jackson’s direction and dialogue and the comic vitality and commitment of his seven-strong cast.
But Fee Fi Fo Fum is not without problems. While it is open to multiple readings, Jackson needs to further distil the points he wants to make, as his script - which is broadly concerned with questions of personal and national identity, and the nature of love - doesn’t offer a fully graspable vision.
Despite this, the Australian theatre industry would be crazy not to champion the uncommonly and extravagantly imaginative writer.
CAST - In order of appearance
Keith Spurr HUCK
Monique Westermann BIFF
Phillipa Trelford GOFA
Susan Neil QUEENIE
Nick Jasprizza SNOW
Mattt Jennings CAPTAIN COOKIE
Dudley Hogarth CLANCY
DESIGN Angus Tattle
DIRECTOR - WRITER Howard Jackson
15 янв 2018
