Sydney Reviews

If it ain’t woke, fixate.

A red curtain recedes and reveals a rubbish tip of a room, clothes strewn on the floor, dirty dishes piled in the adjacent kitchen, a cross dressing clown sat on a recliner in New Theatre’s production of Taylor Mac’s HIR, a gorgeously grotesque and merrily misanthropic romp.

The transvestite face painted man is stroke stricken Arnold, forced to wear clown make-up, a dress and diaper, relegated to repose in a cardboard box, a revenge for years of domestic violence.

This humiliation is meted out by the victim's wife, Paige, whose other hobby is trans-parenting her transitioning daughter Max from female to male. Paige turns between administering unsuitable pharmaceuticals to an infantile middle aged man and administering transubstantiation boosters to a female maturing into a man.

As if raging teenage hormones aren't enough to deal with in the hetero-normative universe, the administration of testosterone to the maturing, transitioning Max creates an even more querulous, surly, woke addled adolescent. 

These supplements are colloquially known as “mones”, and, by perverted Pygmalia, that is a perfectly coined abbreviation. As Paige pumps her daughter with testosterone, she gaily pumps her invalid husband with oestrogen.

Enter Isaac, Paige and Arnold's elder son, recently dishonourably discharged from the US Marine Corps for anal drug abuse. He is horrified by his father's humiliation and draws up battle lines against his monstrous mother, seeking to turn Max's allegiance from mummy’s boy to son of a gun.

Jodine Muir plays Paige with furious and ferocious A-bomb aplomb, a harping harridan with a haranguing tongue, a Mommy Dearest domestic Dr. Moreau, whose gender agenda is something to grapple with.

Rowan Greaves is playfully pathetic as the emasculated infantalised and manipulated Arnold, enough to garner some sympathy for a product of toxic patriarchy.

Lola Kate Carlton makes a mark as Max, supercilious, provocative, churlish, and Luke Visentin is suitably volatile as the prodigal son, Isaac, who joined the military as a ticket out of the family, only to return to find a home even more dysfunctional than the one he left, a repatriation from one war zone to another.

From its transmogrifying curtain reveal beginning to its tawdry, tragic finale, underscored by The Turtles’ Happy Together, HIR may not be transformative, but it does have the ability to transfix.