The Ballad of Backbone Joe

It's a wooden-industrial macabre story of murder and revenge and has a blues-instrumented country feel, but The Ballad of Backbone Joe is a comedy. Double-bass, drum-kit and bass-guitar players Glen Walton, Joseph O'Farrell and Miles O'Neil play Detective Von Trapp, star boxer Backbone Joe and villain Dan. Dan's meat business is on the decline in grimy 1930s Melbourne, and is kept afloat by Joe's evening boxing matches. If only Joe could work out what takes place during his mysterious blackouts between fights. Into this cosy arrangement walks Detective Von Trapp, with a letter for Joe.

The three drama-trained members of Melbourne band The Suitcase Royale do the music, play the characters and run the lights. The home-made set — which travels with the band — is integral to the story and is as organic and indivisible from the action as the actors. It folds out over the stage, spilling basin, curtain and doors — a piece of wild turf with a shovel, a boxing ring and an abattoir. It's broad and rough-hewn, shaking and shivering with the action of the play, as the three members of The Suitcase Royale inhabit it, pop out the top, run rear-projection across the middle and — in the performance I saw — memorably break it for your entertainment. The actors toy with it like toddlers in a cardboard box.

The Suitcase Royale does song, story and comedy equally well. Singer Amanda Palmer described their 2007 Edinburgh fringe show as "a junkyard paradise combination of Monty Python and Terry Gilliam" and added "go or die". An audience member the night I saw them favoured them as a musical version of The Goodies. While Mile O'Neil's Dan definitely has something of the evil Graeme Garden about him, comparisons sell this show short. This production is organic, funny, weird, creepy and electric. But to find out just how funny, how fun, get over to The Wharf before their short Sydney season ends.<