Merlin Theatre, Malthouse, Melbourne
September
The greatest strength and weakness of Kage's production of Look Right Through Me lies in the role that Michael Leunig has as a national cultural icon. We all feel that we own him and so have a stake in how this work is resolved. How one responds to Look Right Through Me depends largely on one's personal relationship with Leunig's oeuvre. We are simply too attached to Leunig to accept a vision that does not accord with our own.
Look Right Through Me is a loving homage to Michael Leunig's work and seems to reflect the personal relationship that director Kate Denborough has with him. It follows the wanderings of a man who wakes up disconsolate and finds sustenance in the people he meets on his journey.
The set design is striking and has many of the hallmarks of Leunig's imagined world. Set behind a high cyclone fence, the landscape is bleak, the characters contained or trapped in a junkyard. Plaster ducks, a rowboat, a skeletal, leafless tree are as much characters in this world as the human inhabitants. The atmosphere is murky, grim and seen mainly in half-light.
The work is made up of episodes. It shows moments of tenderness, violence, innocence connection and alienation. These vignettes are played out, dissolve and move into other episodes or fragments. As such there is variety of movement style and energy and scene changes that keep the work fresh and allow for renewed audience engagement. For me though the prevailing impression was of bleakness and brutality. My personal vision of Leunig's work has a greater emphasis on the redemptive qualities of human connection and an underlying sweetness and I was not rewarded with quite strong enough glimpses of these qualities to be satisfied. Presumably the character of the child was intended to convey some of this but it fell short of the aching poignance that I was looking for.
Dualities and equivalences were certainly conveyed through the varied scenes. Just as the junkyard became a playground, play turns to violence and violence turns to play in the spaces between the scenes. A rope is both a noose and a swing, a tree can be a potential site for self harm or a refuge for a snooze. A woman can be both a saviour and an object of sexual appetite or aggression. Contrast is achieved through Leunig's signature subversion of the obvious, the expected. Ambiguity is rife. Is a patch of grass decorated with a bed head and end a bed - or a grave?
Striking contrasts were also portrayed through shifts in movement quality and style. While the weightiness and slow-motion inertia of some segments uniformly conveyed a deadness and struggle to make any kind of progress forward, the portrayal of joyful moments were less convincing. They seemed stylised and mere representations of joy rather than embodiments of it.
The most striking moments occurred when an emotion was captured. The simple tenderness of a woman carrying a naked man, his absolute vulnerability. The fact that this act is performed with such ease is touching. The woman's writhing solo. A contrasting scene where the woman drags the man on her back, crawling, the full weight of the task apparent. The essence of Leunig as captured and distilled by Kage was not wholly successful for me. But maybe that's more about me than the production.
- SUSAN BENDALL