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| The cast of Going Down Photo by Brett Boardman |
This is the story of a writer, a woman, who has writer’s block and feels under pressure to write the next thing. She creates situations in her life to write about and ends up developing the show we’re watching.
The main character is a fictionalised version of the
playwright and the play contains a crazy sex scene, fantasy sequences where the
writer loses her mind and an important cameo by a member of the large cat
family.
If you think all of these elements would add up to create a
brilliant show, you’d be right. Except that brilliant show isn’t Michele Lee’s Going Down, it’s Lally Katz’s Atlantis.
The element that is unique to Lee’s show is her background
and the key struggle she has is with the expectation that she must delve into
her heritage to write her next work or any work at all.
Going Down is a
reaction to Michele Lee’s experience with her book, Banana Girl, which received criticism from inside and outside the
local Hmong community for not representing her “ethnic experience”. That is great
central premise that threads through the show but is mostly lost in sea of
heavy-handed, obvious jokes.
The play is a satire on Melbourne hipsters and coffee
culture and art wankers and ethnic stereotypes and gender stereotypes and queer
stereotypes and the self-indulgent struggle of writers’ block and the
expectation that writers should explicitly write what they know.
All those subjects are ripe to be made fun of, but very
little of it works very well.
“I’m never going north of Bell Street again,” the main
character complains after a terrible time in country Victoria. This feels
interesting but it’s not developed. (She talks of being "So-Bey" or South of Bell, which was my favourite joke in the show.)
“I’m come south of the Yarra!” the main character shouts, in
the laziest Melbourne joke imaginable.
The play relies so much on references for the audience to “get”
that it plays like an episode of Family
Guy, a show that is more concerned with being a delivery system for pop
culture parody than it is with telling a story. Much of the satire in Lee’s
play is purely surface; the names of at least a dozen Melbourne suburbs are recited
throughout and every time the Wheeler Centre is mentioned, the laughs got more
and more muted.
I love writing that mines specificity of place to good
effect. Christos Tsiolkas’ work gets a shout-out because his work is Melbourne-based
and very aware of his cultural background, but to what effect? Is Lee
criticising him? Or is it just another reference for people who go to book events
at the Wheeler Centre to “get”?
Admittedly, even as I resisted the tick-box style of expected
local jokes, I couldn’t help but chuckle when the main character shouts at her
socially-conscious African-Australian friend “You grew up in Glen Waverley!” It’s
funny because I grew up there, too.
The central conceit of a writer who resists embracing
cultural touchstones out of fear she’ll stereotype herself is a fascinating
one. Putting her up against a rival author who puts her ethnicity front-and-centre
should make for a much more challenging work. And challenging can be funny,
too.
Unfortunately, Leticia Caceres’ production (originally staged
at the Sydney Theatre Company) plays more like a sketch comedy program that
hits every joke too many times with performances that redefine over-the-top. Most
troubling is Catherine Davies’ one-note central performance as Natalie, the
Michele Lee stand-in. The rest of the cast fair better, notably Jenny Wu and
Paul Blenheim, as a selection of different characters in Natalie’s life. Wu, in
particular, carries much of the weight of the show as Natalie’s rival and later
as her mother.
If I hadn’t seen Atlantis,
maybe Going Down would have seemed
fresher. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare the work of a new writer to one of
Australia’s great playwrights, but where Katz’s play made smart, bold choices, Going Down plays it safe. It makes fun
of soft targets and does not dig into the dense subject matter that the main
character – and the writer - is trying to avoid.
And, yes, even if that is part of the point, it fell
dramatically and comedically flat for me.
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