Thursday 12 October 2000

Meat Party, Oct 12, 2000


By Duong Le Qu 
Playbox at Merlin Theatre October 12 to 28, 2000

Reviewer: Kate Herbert



Two differing styles meet in Michael Kantor's  production of Duong Le Quy's Meat Party. Kantor's direction is abstract, visual spectacular, drawing on the modern Japanese as well as Eastern European theatrical forms. Le Quy's text is political realism set in contemporary Vietnam.



Kantor, with dramaturg Tom Wright,  edited the script and created an atmosphere of mystery and violence. On a vast, sloping expanse of stage designed by Dorotka Sapinska  with epic lighting (bluebottle p/l) the cast of eight creates an almost mythic sense of landscape and war.



Mary, (Alice Garner) a young Australian cellist, travels to the White Sand Desert, a slightly unreal region in Vietnam. She seeks her dead father, Gabriel's (Matthew Crosby)  remains.



 He was an Australian soldier killed in Vietnam and a renowned flautist. Mary carries her own instrument with her on her quest for her father's flute lost in battle.



She enlists the aid of Quan  (Huong Nguyen) , the Chairman of the People's Council of the White Sand Desert. His father , Lam  (Tam Phan), is  a communist revolutionary war hero who is an autocrat and lives in the revolutionary Leninist past.



Mary also seeks assistance from An,  (Tony Yap) who collected belongings of dead western soldiers.



The war permeates the contemporary world in this Vietnam. Huge metal doors swing open to reveal starkly lit soldiers, smoking air and pounding gunfire.



All this is in contrast with a chanting madwoman (Yumi Umiumare) who prowls the sands, collecting whitened bones of the dead and nursing the bones of her children. This is counterpointed by the haunting song of Mai (Trang Nguyen), the dead Vitenamese girl who comforted Mary's father as he died.



The ensemble is very strong and the choral and movement basis for the style is evocative. Darrin Verhagen's  music creates a punishing atmosphere. The use of Crosby as translator in Vietnamese language scenes is an excellent device.



The stage is littered with symbolic objects: Gabriels' flute, hundreds of insence sticks, suitcases of the dead soldiers laid out like tombstones, Prisoner of War clothing dropping from the sky.



The Meat Party is a euphemism for The War. The county fed on its own flesh and its people suffered for 30 years.



By Kate Herbert


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