A Social Service - Malthouse
From two heroes of Melbourne indie theatre comes a satire about art, economics and public housing.
Overview
Both Nicola Gunn and David Woods are impressive performers and creators in their own right: Gunn has carved out a well-established indie career in Melbourne under the moniker SANS HOTEL, while Woods has appeared to acclaim in productions for Australian companies like Back to Back Theatre’s Ganesh Vs The Third Reich and a string of smash hits with his own group, Ridiculusmus.
For this Malthouse Theatre production, the two have come together to make A Social Service, a satire that sees Gunn as an artist developing a work within a housing commission. Woods takes on a range of characters, from the KeepCup-wielding impresario, making wispy declarations of his love for a Punchdrunk-style performance of Macbeth in a housing estate, to the bullish president of the residents’ committee.
One of the play’s central conceits is fascinating: after a while you realise that the conversation between 'Nicola' and a young, community-engaged artist from the flats (with script in hand) is itself being framed as a rehearsal or performance; a very subtle 'play-within-a-play'. It’s through this exchange that A Social Service offers its most interesting moments, as the young artist (played in this performance by Shaan Juma) starts to gently probe the aversion of this “artist-in-residence” to anything “earnest”, which she says is “something of a dirty word in my circles”.
Seeing A Social Service on the night after opening, the laughter in the audience is thin on the ground. It’s not as if the play’s language is couched solely in insider jokes that only artists can understand. Gunn’s well-meaning, idealistic but ultimately naïve character is a broad enough archetype for an audience to engage with. As she writes in the show’s program, A Social Service is “a critique of the model of commissioning works intended to activate public spaces”. While that’s certainly an interesting idea — one that operates at the sticky nexus between art, money and appearances — it doesn’t seem like it can sustain the narrative as the biggest focus of an hour-long satire.
Image by Pia Johnson.
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