ARTIFICIAL DREAMS OF A MEDIOCRE GOD.
A Phantom Gravity. Shadow House
Pits. Smiths Alternative. Wednesday February 24. 2021
Reviewed by Peter Wilkins
Archie Roach’s lyrics spring to
mind as I sit in Smith’s Bookshop, waiting for Joe Woodward’s latest foray into
his alternative theatrical experience to commence. Love it or hate it Shadow
House Pits’ Artificial Dreams of a
Mediocre God is arguably an inescapable assault on the intellect. Back to
Archie’s lyrics “From little things big things grow” Smith’s Bookshop under musician, producer and
entrepreneur Nigel McRae has undergone a
fascinating transformation over the years from a bookshop to a bar and music
venue to a grunge venue for artistic experimentation and under McRae an
intimate theatre venue for the discerning theatregoer. Around the world
independent artists test their ideas from basement cabarets to Off Broadway
kickstart experiments. Think Rent.
Think Hamilton. Some become
influential institutions in their own right. Think La Mama in Melbourne. Think
Peter Brook. Think Bertolt Brecht. Crude though the comparison may be, it is
this inspiration that informs the original and declamatory rough theatre of Artificial Dreams of a Mediocre God.
Smith’s Bookshop is Canberra’s
very own Off Broadway, where artists have free licence to play with ideas,
experiment with theatrical form and take a swipe at convention. Woodward is no stranger
to stretching the imagination, delving into the psyche and challenging the
mediocre. To venture into the shadows of Shadow House Pits is to go where no
one has dared to go before. It is to give oneself over to the unexpected and to
sign up to an evening of confrontation and intellectual subjugation. Agree or
disagree, indifference is no option. Rap is the clarion call of the discontented,
the cry of protest and the pulsating sound of accusation. MC Krewd (Bambi
Valentine) drives a verbal spike through complacency, punctuatd by Bevan Noble’s
sound design. In a peroxide blonde wig MC Krewd is a force to be reckoned with;
her rap is a gattling gun of invective, splintering the injustice and asserting
the power to assume control. MC Krewd is no shrinking violet but a force to be
reckoned with and a performer with guts and sassiness. She is accompanied on
stage and in an expertly choreographed routine by Ink Bits, a defiant rebel,
giving the finger and joining MC Krewd in an in-your-face attack on sexual
exploitation and domination.
The second half of Shadow House
Pits’s evening of somewhat surreal and
weirdly bizarre collection of rap, hip hop and story telling tells the
moralistic tale of Smug, adored by his parents, raised as a genius and sent to
school to be a shining example of exceptionalism. Woodward, assuming his alter
ego of Trinculo, Alonso’s trickster and
jester in The Tempest, narrates with
actor Wynter Grainger the story of Smug, the victim and perpetrator of society’s
conservative expectation. In a storytelling convention, Woodward and Grainger
read the tale of the misguided Smug, who idolizes his teacher, despises his
classmates and eventually becomes an educational supremo, subject to the
blind enforcement of an immutable system.
His obsession with Dr. Who transforms him into the doctor’s nemesis, the villainous
Dalek. Smug is the victim of a stultified society, compelled to follow its
commands, a lobotomy on independent thought. Smug’s destiny is pre-determined.
His fate is the fate of all who would fail to question and to change.
Woodward claims that Artificial Dreams of a Mediocre God will
most likely be the most unusual theatre that we will experience this year. This
is the theatre of ideas, appealing more to the intellect than the heart. It is
rough, unpretentious, even unrefined. It is not the theatre of spectacle, nor
the theatre of seduction. It is the theatre of the intellect, an hour of
engagement with anarchic inquisition, best experienced with a glass of
preference in one’s hand and a mind prised open by MC Krewd’s audacious
brashness and Woodward and Grainger’s simple storytelling and lucid dialectic.
Woodward defies the theatre of
seduction. He abandons the artifice of that willing suspension of disbelief and
is more closely aligned to the tenets of Brecht than the aficionados of Theatre
of Illusion and Spectacle. At Smith’s Bookshop it is the mind that is opened
and the open door of apathy that is closed.
If you haven’t been to Smith’s Bookshop, treat yourself to a night of mental
stimulation and intellectual illumination. It is an experience that you are
unlikely to have in any other theatre this year.
