"I saw discharge. It's on the table." These seven words, spoken by one Dr Waterman, go a long way toward summing up Griffin Theatre's Quack. It's a gross-out fest of the sort that has a long history in theatre but is rarely seen in these days of restrained living-room dramedy.
For inspiration playwright Ian Wilding clearly watched Deadwood and judged it to be missing some zombies (of the Shaun more than Dawn of the Dead mould). He has both veins intersect in an outback mining town, where debased old Dr Littlewood (Chris Haywood) and young overachiever Dr Waterman (Charlie Garber) are battling approaches to treating the sickness that has overcome the town. Soon, symptoms progress to telltale shuffling, brain-eating and rapid contagion, and the uninfected doctors are joined in panic, plotting and occasional battle by cooped-up scribe and suffragette Fanny (Aimee Horne), her shrill guardian Nancy (Jeanette Cronin) and the all-round-offensive newspaper editor Gunner (Cronin again).
It's hard to build tension without the physical imposition of lurching zombie bodies, but the four frantic actors, groaning sound design (courtesy of David Heinrich) and fake blood, guts and fluids get you part of the way there. The performers are hilarious and brilliant at bringing to life their contrasting characters. They grapple on a set that's built askew (by designer William Bobbie Stewart), a burlesque, pirateish deck that slopes towards the audience, absorbing you in its wonder and facilitating the free flow of fluids in your direction. Framing it, curtains that emulate red velvet deserve to be looked at askance: they're thin, crusty and patchily dyed blood-red. It's the perfect set; it even smells discomfiting.
The focus and great success of Wilding's script is its language, with dialogue as fast as a zombie isn't (unless you're talking 28 Days Later zombies possibly as fast as those), unrelenting slapstick, thick puns and wordplay furnished by the fullness of the Victorian era, the modern age and the made-up in-between. There's satire in it, but it's painted in the broadest of brushstrokes. Quack is fun, but for a play that's entire purpose is to entertain, it's not quite fun enough. It lacks for plot and poetry and drags in a couple of places before being saved by its secretions. Sit in the front row at your own peril.
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