Left – Alison Bell and Eddie Perfect. Cover – Heidi Arena, Alison Bell, Rohan Nichol, Christie Whelan Browne, Toby Truslove and Eddie Perfect. Photos – Ken NakanishiWhat a carve up!
After surviving a catastrophe at sea, three men, Baird, Simon and Rob, vow to make every meal count, to cultivate organic cuisine, and to adopt the Nose to Tail ethos of entire and sustainable consumption.
Cannibalism will do that to you, guesses Eddie Perfect in his black comedy, The Beast.
Back on terra firma, the men have opted for a tree change – the sea change was a game changer – living in, and off of, the country. Their latest plan is to buy a whole calf and have it butchered and eat the entire beast in dishes cooked up by each of them.
When the slaughterman calls in “butchers hook”, it is left to the chaps to do the chop, in a staging that makes the recent controversial and community condemned live export meat vision pale in cruel, blood-letting comparison. It's played for laughs and it gets them, along with bovine puns about the cattle's pastures concealing their true purpose as death camps – Cows-chwitz and Dac-cow.
There are pearls before the bovine in The Beast – the communal apoplexy of a male fronting up to babysit, propagating the poisonous presumption that all men are paedophile; the know-it-all ignoramus' comeuppance by the vigneron over a variety of vine and vintage; and the narcissistic flattery of a philanderer physically flipped by fulsome squeezing of the scrotum, are nicely observed and niftily performed.
Abortion, adoption, adultery are among the meaty topics that fuel this often pitch black play, as well as the manipulation of relationships. “Who said you had to like your friends?” is a line that resonates and reverberates throughout the play.
Rohan Nichol is suitably slimy as Simon, the obnoxious serial bore who has groomed his African foster child for sex and can't make up his mind whether his wife, Gen, is a deadshit or just shy. Christie Whelan Browne plays his long suffering wife in a way that gives pause for Simon's puzzled callous concern. Toby Truslove plays Rob, the hen pecked, pussy whipped, secret smoker spouse of Sue, played by Heidi Arena. Her performance as the craven carrot craver is the most wantonly exaggerated. Alison Bell plays Marge, married to Baird, played by the playwright, Eddie Perfect. Peter Houghton doubles as Skipper and Jan, the babysitter, as well as a local vigneron and Farmer Brown, a double your pleasure, double your fun turn, dazzling with his characterisation and comic timing.
Dale Ferguson's set and costume design encompasses the abstract and the real, the naive and the sophisticated, a perfect accompaniment to the script.
Directed by Simon Phillips, The Beast is a lumbering theatrical creature, chewing the cud, ruminating too long when a little stampeding would have behooved the pace of the piece. There are a lot of choice cuts in The Beast, but also a fair bit of gristle. One choice cut would be to excise the back on the boat flashback which is superfluous and stultifying.
Excessive running time takes some of the bewdy from The Beast.
The Beast
by Eddie Perfect
Directed by Simon Phillips
Venue: Sydney Opera House, Drama Theatre
Dates: 27 July – 14 August 2016
Bookings: thebeastplay.com
Also Touring
Melbourne
Comedy Theatre
25 August – 4 September 2016
Brisbane
QPAC
15 – 18 September 2016
