Photos - Brett BoardmanI was lured into Griffin’s Stable Theatre to see the Australian premier of Dea Loher’s Tattoo by the promise of a Grimm Brothersesque dark fairy tale, a playfully morbid adventure into Germanic folk lore with a moralistic undercurrent, which is not to say that Stories Like These/Antipodea didn’t deliver so much as I got more than I bargained for. Both play and production are posited within the theoretical frameworks of Brecht and Artaud; the play is a step away from the real but presents the audience with the fragmented refractions of the shattered mirror that Loher’s play turns on the darker side of the loving family unit.
One of Loher’s first plays, originally written in 1992, Tattoo becomes frighteningly more evocative and disturbing in light of the horrors performed by Josef Fritzl in his Austrian basement over the past twenty four years. Tattoo is the story of Anita (Sophie Kelly) who is in her final years of high school, her melodramatic little sister Lulu (Megan Drury), her repressed and emotionally dysfunctional mother who is affectionately known as Dog-Face Julie (Sandra Eldridge) and her very loving father; the town baker Oven-Wolf (David Ritchie). Oven-Wolf loves his family and values the family unit and his role as family leader utmost. So much so that he even feels it is his responsibility to introduce his daughters to ‘womanhood’ by ‘teaching’ them how to please a man. He begins with just Anita and rewards his affection with gifts and tokens that begin to open the rift of jealousy as Lulu craves her father’s favour without truly understanding its consequence.
Ritchie as Oven-Wolf is cold and menacing. He appears to channel Fritzl - at least the caricature the world media provided of this monster - yet remains charismatic and persuasive. He sets the tone and pace of the play, which is only interrupted by Flower-Paul (Simon Corfield) when he meets Anita in a nightclub trying to escape her reality, their meeting the catalyst of change within the play. But while the men of Tattoo form the base of the play it is the women that the play is about; as we watch them learn from and react to the horrors they each must face.
Tattoo is not an easy play to watch, it’s not a relaxed night out at the theatre with the social elite of Sydney, but it does force the audience to face a story not so dissimilar to that of Elizabeth Fritzl, who had been confined in her father’s basement for fifteen years by the time Loher had finished the play. Rochelle Whyte’s (director) aesthetic rips down the fourth wall both through her implementation of Amanda McNamara’s and Martin Kinnane’s design work and her command of her cast. The balance to the alienating plot and production is the human element the female characters bring through their performances.
The production is tight, but the content covered is confronting. It’s exciting that Stories Like These/Antipodea is willing to go out on a limb here and produce a play that I doubt was ever intended to please audiences. As a the opening production of Griffin’s 2009 Independent Season Tattoo, as the precursor, promises audiences a year of contemporary, risk taking theatre by our emerging theatrical practitioners. Tattoo is a mark, a scar on the skin of humanity, that can’t be ignored because if we pretend it doesn’t exist then these horrors will continue to be performed as we turn our heads away.
An Antipodea, Stories Like These and Griffin Independent Australian Premiere
TATTOO
by Dea Loher
Director Rochelle Whyte
Venue: SBW Stables Theatre, 10 Nimrod Street, Kings Cross NSW 2011
Previews: 4 - 5 March
Season: 6 - 28 March
Times: Monday – Saturday 7pm, Saturday Matinee 2pm.
Bookings: Griffin Booking Line - 02 8002 4772 or online at www.griffintheatre.com.au
