Sunday 22 October 2000

Food of Love, Oct 22, 2000


 by Seduction Opera
at Beckett Theatre until October 28, 2000
Reviewer: Kate Herbert


"If music be the food of love play on,'" said Duke Orsino in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Seduction Opera's show, Food of Love, is a peculiar but satisfying miscellany of music, food art and political comedy.

It is an effective collision of three artists who work virtually independently on stage: actor/singer, Jan Friedl, political comedian, Rod Quantock and classical pianist, James Voss playing Bach's Partita no 4 in D.

Director, Brian Lipson, cleverly and often wittily weaves the three discrete components into a cohesive if not always coherent whole.

The piece opens with Friedl lying in her white pyjamas on a double bed under beams of stark white light. She talks to us about food, her childhood, her musical history, her parents, dreams, teaching and students.

 It is a disconnected and dislocated stream of consciousness rave that bears little direct relation to Quantock's part of the show.

Light and fascinating and evocative slides of the galaxy designed by Jens Milbret and other images, spill across her as she drapes herself upon the now upright bed.

Quantock's comic pratings are a continuation of his stream of invective directed toward the incompetence and cowardice of the Howard government and the uglification of the architecture of the city of Melbourne.

In addition to his architecture lecture, he gives a coherent and informative and funny lecture-demonstration of Pythagoras' Theorem of triangles, irrational numbers and the structure of musical notation. How he gets gags out of these is a mystery but he does.

Throughout these two intermingled raves, a laconic Voss moves from grand piano, where he plays Bach with exceptional virtuosity - then he prepares and eats a cheese sandwich or orders a pizza. All three performers shift, apparently aimlessly, from bed to telephone to desk, interjecting, cooking toast, making coffee and eating.

This is an odd-ball show which is clever, funny moving and musically superb. It is not a play but a collage of images and ideas that intersect in a novel way.


By Kate Herbert

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