After spending a few minutes staring at a blank white stage, the theatre lights dimmed and a voiceover announcement warned that anyone caught using their phone would be taken outside and killed. Next thing we knew, two women appeared on stage, accordingly dressed in all-white, and proceeded to enact one of the most horrific, shocking, slapstick and hilarious opening scenes in theatre history. Accompanied by the gaudy sounds of Rihanna and Eminem’s Love the Way You Lie, the creators and stars of Oedpius Schmoedipus, Mish Grigor and Zoe Coombs Marr, carried out a succession of increasingly extravagant suicides and murders. Both performers were left sopping in blood, and they proudly wore this blood for the remainder of the show.
In a roundabout way, this introduction was designed to tell us that Oedipus Schmoedipus would be about death. Having scrutinised several 1,000 so-called classic plays, Grigor and Coombs Marr reached the conclusion that the only inarguable universal truth is death. So, what followed was an exposition of how death’s been portrayed throughout the history of Western theatre.
Instead of merely alluding to the work’s core purpose, the two leads spoke directly to the audience as they picked apart the notion that the classics speak for all of us (irrespective of the fact many of them appear either horribly outdated or just plain dull). Oedipus Schmoedipus might appropriately be called a post-modern performance piece, a bizarro comedy show or an extreme TED talk. But a conventional work of narrative theatre it ain’t. Along with making incisive claims, Grigor and Coombs Marr’s rhetorical dialogue was frequently hilarious. For instance, quotes from great plays were unraveled to suggest things such as if “Death is an island,” then Australia must be death, but if “Death is bitter,” then drinking a whole bottle of Angostura will kill you.
But it was the involvement of 25 performing volunteers that made Oedipus Schmoedipus an exceptionally engaging and absurd spectacle. Obeying video prompts, the unrehearsed volunteers upped the onstage chaos and added a haphazard charm. This risky ploy not only tempted on-stage death (figuratively speaking), but also subverted the conventions regarding the sort of behaviour that belongs on theatre stages.
After an irony-laden crescendo – which saw Grigor and Coombs Marr pledge allegiance to the ‘universal’ works, largely written by straight white men, propagating patriarchal ideals – the show concluded with a gang of ghosts, flapping from inside white bed sheets. By now, all pathos had disappeared and hysterical laughter threatened to remove several audience members from their seats. Who said that death isn’t funny?
BY AUGUSTUS WELBY
