Give yourself to the Elk: STC's Perplex

Described as a shape-shifting theatrical puzzle, Marius von Mayenburg’s Perplex is, well, a perplexing series of scenes, each interconnected with those immediately either side of it, but otherwise a standalone vignette of exquisite absurdism. Directed by Sarah Giles, Perplex is playing in Sydney Theatre Company’s Wharf 1 theatre, and it’s quite a giddy night of theatre.

Wearing his inspiration on his sleeve, von Mayenburg takes a leaf out of Pirandello’s legendary Six Characters in Search of an Author and spins a chameleonic rhapsody of a reality-fuck out of the endless possibilities afforded by two doors and four actors. Like a giant game of Thank God You’re Here or musical chairs, whenever someone decisively exits or enters through a door, the scene changes, and the scene starts anew, an endless series of possibilities and multiple universes just waiting to be explored.

The reality of television: Griffin’s Beached

At eighteen years old, and weighing over 400 kilograms, Arthur (Arty) is the world’s heaviest teenager. With his gastric bypass surgery scheduled for 259 days’ time, he is assigned a Pathways to Work officer and put on a strict diet, while his every move is followed by a ravenous reality TV crew from a show called ‘Shocking Fat Stories.’ This is the world of Melissa Bubnic’s 2010 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award-winning play, Beached.

Directed by Shannon Murphy, Bubnic’s play is an unapologetically satiric and pointed look at the obesity epidemic, and tries to unpick “society’s insatiable appetite for human misery.” Murphy’s direction is bold and ambitious, her staging audacious and inventive, as she (ingeniously) shows us the artifice behind the ‘reality’ of reality television. In a set constructed like a television studio, two patterned walls create a corner in which Arty sits, while cameras, lights, backdrops and costumes hang from the rungs of a cage-like scaffold which moves around him, encasing and restricting his movement and freedom.