Fake it 'Til You Make it - Theatre Works

Overview

By now, Bryony Kimmings should be well-known to Melbourne audiences. Last year, the daring British performance artist simultaneously toured two critical smash-hits to the city: Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model at the Festival of Live Art, and Sex Idiot at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

In some ways, Fake it 'Til You Make It is a kind of dark sequel to the achingly funny Sex Idiot, in which Kimmings traced her sexual chronology back through time. Now her real-life partner Tim Grayburn has become her co-star and collaborator, as the pair craft a narrative that intertwines his experience of chronic depression with hers as the woman who loves him. More than one moment in the show makes obvious references to the other; at one point the pair spell out an exhaustive, staggering list of the symptoms of depression on cuecards, a moment with traces of Kimmings’ crowdpleasing 'Fanny Song' from Sex Idiot (a song which made its own nod towards Bob Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'). Here, the artist’s approach to music and sound design is just as eclectic and often surprising, with the 'Love Theme' from Cinema Paradiso taking pride of place alongside infectious earworm 'Let’s Talk About Gender, Baby'.

Throughout the show, there are some brilliant scenes that stand as defiant reminders of what theatre alone can do — where the arrangement of competing voices, music and live bodies in space align. In one hugely affecting moment of this kind, a masked Grayburn is delivering a routine speech to colleagues at his advertising firm before he is first interrupted then overwhelmed by burst fragments of his own verbatim recordings with Kimmings.

Overall, the combination of all these different elements — the recordings, songs, heartfelt confessions exposed to an audience and spotlight — occasionally risks overbalancing, feeling jumpy and disjointed. But that’s the paradox of representing trauma onstage; it’s a ruptured, messy form that marries content with style, and its messiness ultimately says a lot more about its subject than any conventionally polished play ever could.