Sydney Reviews

In Kiss Me Kate, there’s a song called 'Brush Up Your Shakespeare'.

In As You Like It or The Land Acknowledgement, Shakespeare is given the brush off and writer performer, Cliff Cardinal presents a kiss my hate monologue of kick arse proportion. 

His hate is colonial cultural rape, primarily in his native North America and the show is an unapologetic “kiss my arse you colonial culture rapist” repartee. It’s funny and angry and provocative and pricking.

As You Like It may not be as you like it when you go to the theatre. As Kenneth Tynan said in a speech back in 1958 “What we have to decide is whether we want our drama to batten onto the lipstick of life or on the blood of it.”

Well, there’s nothing cosmetic about Cliff Cardinal in the blood boiling, provocative piece about Western colonisation and Western woke, the salving grace of liberal thinkers who pay lip service to Sorry, but not much more.

For those who think a nice night at the theatre is a divertissement, a distraction more likely to be extolled at the expense of the piece that focuses, a pleasant after dinner relax, As You Like It will not be as you like it.

Cliff Cardinal doesn't let you relax and nor should he. Systematic racism of our ancestors has become the systemic racism of our time, preserving prevailing stereotypes, and Cardinal calls it out.

The Catholic church and all its schismatics are pilloried for setting up so called schools, which he calls rape camps of culture, with commandant paedophile priests and Nazi nuns. With his piercing perception and damning articulation, one wonders whether these powers that be regret having taught him English!

Cardinal was a guest of the Sydney Festival back in 2017 with Huff, which I reviewed was a vivid, vigorous, vehement account of harsh realities, difficult truths and a veritable, seemingly inevitable, recurring vicious cycle. Eight years later, he’s doing it again, presenting a devastating yet leavened with an acerbic humour examination of land acknowledgements as cultural and political practice.

Cardinal’s Cree and Lakota heritage deeply inform his take on the play, which  richly resonates with our own colonial past and prickly present post referendum.