Low Pay? Don’t Pay! by Dario Fo. Translation by Joseph Farrell. Directed by Cate Clelland. Canberra Rep. Canberra Rep Theatre. To Dec 6.
Low Pay? Don’t Pay! starts a little too slowly but once it gets up a bit of steam in the strong hands of director Cate Clelland and a capable cast it turns into a heartfelt production that is driven by Fo’s sense of history, politics and social justice.
They’ve Anglicised the names and made references to suburbs in Canberra but this play remains resolutely Dario Fo and deeply Italian even in translation and really ought to stay there. But that’s a hard call; how do you translate the Italians?
Toni (Maddie Lee) and Maggie (Chloe Smith) are battling the cost of living and decide to take matters into their own hands when it comes to what they will pay for things, if anything. Hiding the goods is another matter and Toni in particular becomes adept at spinning fantastical explanations and creating false pregnancies to conceal groceries.
Toni’s husband Joe (Lachlan Abrahams) falls for this and reveals his own fantastical view of how a pregnancy works. Maggie’s husband Lou (Rowan McMurray) is a little more grounded.
There’s good capture of characters who are battlers with heaps of attitude. It’s all happening in a working class suburb with graffiti and washing on the line.
Meanwhile the cops are watching out and not averse to a bit of aggro.
Antonia Kitzel is simply billed as The Actor but that means she expertly plays a range of parts, from police heavies to wonderfully ancient tottering neighbours, transformations often assisted by a mysterious household cupboard upstage.
And there is a large hardworking tribe of extras lurking around the backyards and verandahs, locals, cops, people with opinions, sometimes individuals, more often as a group.
The collective sense of injustice builds until finally at the end of the play all the characters are standing with the workers moving toward the viewer in Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s powerful painting The Fourth Estate (Il quarto stato) (c 1900). It’s a shift from comedy to history but it does make sense. It makes the point that the struggle remains real.
Alanna Maclean
