All the lonely people

Some people just don’t know when to give up. I’m one of them. It’s hard, being bloody-minded. You can’t let things go that easily. It becomes this uphill battle, constantly trying to relax the thoughts out of your mind.

All that’s left to do is throw yourself into a project until you’re so exhausted and so concentrated on that project that the niggling thing you couldn’t forget is gone. It has sunk to the bottom of the pile, so you no longer worry about it.

That is what I’m trying to do now….

Audiopollen Social Festival 09 delivered exactly what it promised. Yusuke Akai and Daiji Igarashii curated an extremely original, way out there music festival. It puts art back into music. The real winner was Atsuhiro Ito here. He did stuff with a neon light I’ve never seen before. The vibrations emanating from that lightbulb were close to the strums of an electric guitar in a heavy metal band, punctuated by Robbie Avenaim’s percussion work. It blew my head off. My friend Kosta had to leave the room. He couldn’t deal with the frequencies. I was in complete heaven. More! I say, more!

Ok, so I’m at least a week late with this. Sorry Girlclumsy. Sorry Birmo. I’ve been sick as a dog, so what can I say? My apologies to all round, especially Beezo. He’s been waiting a while for this.

Here we go.

What did I think of the new adaptation of He Died With A Felafel in His Hand? What did I think of Simon Bedak’s script? Of Girlclumsy’s direction? Of the acting? Well….*drum roll* I loved it. Unapologetically. Sure, I’m biased. Who isn’t when they’re sitting beside the author and the playwright, and are there to support them. But seriously, now, as a playwright myself, I have to say I liked what Mr Bedak did with the dialogue. He stuck to the spirit of the book as much as possible. He updated socio-political references and pop-culture nods to 2009 and it worked. I waited the entire play for my favourite story, when one of these guys, maybe it was downstairs Ivan, maybe another bloke. In any case, he was doing something I’m not sure your average bloke would do. While watching telly with his flatmates, he wanked the dog. No, I’m not kidding. He did. When the flatmates asked, “what do you think you’re doing?” He replied: “just helping out a mate”. It got the usual bellyfull of laughter from the audience and my whoops of approval. There was one line in there, which I’m sure Simon added, when JB [the character] is getting dumped by his junkie girlfriend, she says “you were lousy in bed”. At that point, a very sozzled Birmo piped up “was I? I don’t think so.” This completely disconcerted the actor playing JB.

Girlclumsy’s casting was masterful. The actor playing JB got the smile, the tone of voice, the glint in his eyes just right. He nailed the character. I almost said something else there, but it would have been inaccurate. You get my drift. Everyone else in the cast, except for the girl from Mackay were outstanding. Maybe she was from Rocky. She was good, but eclipsed by an awesome cast with great comic timing. One actor managed to go from being a dominatrix to a cop to a groupie to a dildo wielding femonazi. It was spellbinding seeing the same actors slip in and out of character. Gay Dirk came out on top though. I’ve seen previous renditions of Gay Dirk and until now I’d always thought they were a nod to the queenie stereotype. This time, instead of having a skinny, whiny, over the top camp boy, we got a gay man with attitude, lip and a chip on his shoulder.

As to the direction, I can’t say enough. You can tell where Girlclumsy’s hand took hold of the gear stick. Having the cops come in via the audience was a great idea. Bringing in a Latvian character who loves herring and uses it as courtship tool was inspired. He’s been Russian before, but Latvian? I liked it, even though having tried the best of Latvia cuisine I would say that beef would be more up their alley. And beer. The sex industry however, would probably also be cheaper, but I digress. We’re talking about the direction here, not the state of Latvian society.

Inserting a bevy of dildo wielding babes into the stageplay is enough to warrant my attention. It was almost like watching synchronised swimming in fishnet stockings, black hotpants as a hapless mysoginist gets creamed. Too funny for words. The scene changes were seamless. Even changes of location were done entirely with light and sound design. Love and Rockets was represented by red light, the darkening of the stage and one lone pole dancer, sans pole of course. The funny thing is, in the book, JB never did get to bed her, but in the play, it just ups the ante to have him ask out a stripper.

Set design as per usual for Felafel, has the brown couch, the bucket bong, but no frying pan. No humble frying pan. Instead we get the fridge, which is used as portal to the backstage. It also makes a difference watching it at the Arts Theatre and not at La Boite or at the Gardens Theatre at QUT. Being on front row made it even more interactive, especially when the playwright and the author take enough liberties to heckle the actors from the front row.

All in all, Felafel hit the nail on the head with each blow of the bong. Snappy dialogue, breaks all the rules, by telling us not showing us, but uses the innate storyteller in all of us to draw us into the deeply personal anecdotes JB collated over four weeks and Simon Bedak adapted in the last year. Bravo.