Notes on: Not Now, Not Ever (Queen Hades Productions)
I adore farce. Tending as I do towards depressive flatlining, I’ve discovered that the almost aggressive stimulation of the exaggerated absurd is a wonderful, almost ecstatic electro-therapy to my spirits. Aristophanes is the granddaddy of farce, and this old Greek wag’s Assemblywomen (391BC) has a gender-bended, draggy and chaotic collision with Aussie politics and updated ethics in Margaret Thanos’ highly entertaining new play.
I wish it had a different name. Not Now, Not Ever makes it feel like I am about to be lectured to about not being lectured to. While there is an appearance of Julia Gillard, from whom the title derives, it is a very short appearance, in sock puppet form.
Not Now is a bit of a hard one to rehash, so you may as well suss the plot on the Belvoir 25a website. There’s a dystopian corporation, god-meddling, daddy issues, tea-leaf scrying, a talking goat, a manipulated underdog heroine, and back-stabbing, of course. Plus the central question: what sacrifices are worthwhile in the righteous campaign for change? How can you hold to your principles and identity when it seems impossible to play the game on your own terms?
Notables:
Lib Campbell, the GOAT. Literally. Flouncing across stage in a shuffling bop, excitedly kneading her little hoofs into the front of her fleece, and coquettishly elongating a perfect stockinged leg capped with shining-black tap-dance shoe, Campbell is an adorably prurient talking bovid. What is most unforgettable, and perhaps most technically impressive, is her bleat. Breathless, girlishly pitched, it trembles on the edge of hysteria, squeaking profanities. She manifests in her character that seemingly naive yet carnally insatiable female energy that is having a surge in pop culture at the moment. Her performance is hoofs-down my favourite part of the show.
Matt Abotomey’s perfection of gormless. How does his mouth droop so?
Matt Abotomey’s wholesale disregard for his own dignity and audience comfort whilst eating a tube of pringles. (One hand slapping himself to climax inside a pair of open blue overalls, the other hand dangling, the appendage for transporting each pringle to his mouth a long, oh so terribly long and attenuated, snack-scooping tongue.)
That other scene which made me gasp ‘oh god’ and half-cover a pair of glittering eyes with one hand: when Gora (the randy goat) came on top of Hermes (messenger to the gods) and a little squeeze-bottle hidden in her front pouch appeared to squirt milk into Hermes’ blissfully expectant mouth.
Clay Crighton as Hermes. They impressed me immediately as a Good Actor. You know those people who can just make you feel completely secure in any scene, no matter what is happening? Very glad Crighton was cast to hold the moral centre of this play.
Emma O’Sullivan for being such a convincing ‘bloke’ and goofily winsome heroine, and Hannah Raven for just the perfect portrayal of the cigarette-dangling, seen-it-all, smoking-hot cougar.
Richard Hilliar for his ability to extend a comedic moment beyond the point you assumed it would cease to amuse. His timing can be superb. In drag as a fabulously egotistical Athena (goddess wisdom and strategy, allegedly), he broke me several times with a single unexpected swerve in tone. Also I’m assuming this is the same Richard Hilliar who is behind Tooth and Sinew?! Bit obsessed with his work. UBU changed me. And I loved Turn of the Screw, too.
Ava Madon for making me think of Professor Tralawney on shrooms. Idam Sondhi’s grumpy yaya, a wrinkled right-angle of croaking demands.
The cardboard shoeys the props team made for the Shoey Shoe-off Show-down (abbrev.), apparently a shoe-in for any running candidate for Aussie PM.
The whole cardboard set, actually. Cardboard is suitably thrifty for a 25a production, a fitting material for farce, and a good structural metaphor for the play’s flimsy worlds of both mortals and gods.
Margaret Thanos for writing and directing such an imaginative and invigorating work of new Australian theatre! Major props to her company Queen Hades Productions. I missed her previous Timon of Athens (and uh, everything else she has done, it seems) but I am sold on checking out whatever she does next.
Not Now, Not Ever is at Belvoir 25a until 31 March 2024.
Photos: Claire Hawley
